Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

"What's the use, indeed?" said the husband in a saddened tone. "If one heed not the voice of the past twenty-four hours--" He left the sentence unfinished.

"Oh, I know. Everybody, the world over, will be preaching about Chicago. She was so wicked. Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon! That'll be the talk. I suppose we shall be told ten thousand times that riches have wings--just as though we hadn't seen the wings and couldn't swear to the color of them. But, dear me! I've been thinking that your story of losses by the fire is not worth telling. I wish to goodness we'd bought the house. If you hadn't lost the money, we might have now a respectable-sized story to tell of our losses. I shall be ashamed to tell that we lost just some clothes and household traps, when some people have lost millions. How much better it would sound to say that our house and everything in it was burned! People wouldn't know but it was a fifty-thousand-dollar house. But a few chairs and bedquilts!--it's too small to talk about."

"We've lost enough to satisfy me," said the doctor. "All my practice that I've been ten years in building up! I'm exactly where I was when I began in Chicago. We own but five dollars in the world--haven't even a change of clothes."

"I've a mind to say that we had just bought the house, and it was burned," said Mrs. Lively. "I'm sure it was just the same. But then you never would stand by me in the story: you'd be sure to let the cat out."

"But what good would come of such a story?" asked the doctor.

"Why, people would be so much sorrier for us. Nobody could feel sorry for that old pop-corn woman you were talking to, even if she did lose all she had; and just so it will be with us. It's just like you to be always missing a good thing. If you'd only bought the house before you lost the money!"

"You're determined to saddle the loss of that money on me," the doctor said smiling.

"Well, who lost it if you didn't?"

"I'm sure I can't say."

"Of course you can't. You might as well say that black isn't black as that you didn't lose that money."

"I'll acknowledge, once for all, that I lost the money if you'll let the subject drop," said he wearily. "It's wasting time and breath to talk about it. There," he continued soothingly, "try to forget, and go to sleep."

"It's wasting time and breath telling me to go to sleep," replied the wife.

"Hurrah! here's a cigar!" said the doctor, producing one from his pocket. "Now, if I only had a match to light it!"

"For patience' sake, you needn't be at a loss for a light for a cigar when all this universe is afire. Go and light it at that headboard over there, and then sit down and take your comfort while I'm starving. Why in the world doesn't it rain? I don't see why the Lord should have such a spite against Chicago: we ain't any worse than other people."

And thus the woman continued to run on all night. Up to two o'clock she complained because it didn't rain, and after that she shivered and moaned because it did.

With the morning, water-carts and bakers' wagons began to arrive on the ground. These were quickly emptied among the hungry, thirsty people. Dr. Lively spent his five dollars to within fifty cents for the relief of the sufferers about him. Mrs. Lively obstinately refused to take anything.

"I won't eat bread at twenty-five cents a loaf, and I won't drink water at ten cents a quart. I'll die first!" she declared.

"I want you to take me to the West Division," Dr. Lively said to one of the bakers. He had already tried a dozen times to make terms with teamsters to this end. "I have a wife and child."

"I'll do it for five dollars apiece," replied the man.

"I haven't any money. Will you take a set of silver forks in pawn?"

"He sha'n't have my forks," said Mrs. Lively violently.--"How dare you speculate on our calamities?" she demanded of the baker. "You sha'n't have my forks: I'll stay here and starve first. I mean to stand this siege of extortion to the last gasp."

"But, my dear," remonstrated the doctor, "there are people here who are already near their last gasp. There are the sick and infirm and little children. There are women now on this desolate ground in the pangs of childbirth, and infants not an hour old. These must have help. I must get over to the West Division. There are some hearts over there, I am sure."

"I'll take you, sir," said the baker, "and I don't want none of your silver. I'm beat, sir: I never thought of women hit that way. I can't fight with sich, and with babies born in a graveyard. I'm whipped, sir. I ain't never had much of a chance to make a extry dollar: I thought this fire had give me a chance. My shop was left, full of flour. I was bakin' all night; but darn me if I kin put the screw onto babies, and women in childbed. You shall have my horse and cart and all my bakery for 'em. Come, load up."[A]

[Footnote A: It need scarcely be said that the incidents here related are literal facts, which came under the writer's observation in the midst of the scenes described.]

On their way through the burnt district, on the ill-fated Chicago Avenue, they passed a ruined wall where people were preparing to dig out two men. One was crying piteously in mixed German and English for help. The other, except his head and shoulders, was completely buried beneath the ruins. As the people began to remove the rubbish he said in a tone expressive at once of pluck and agony, "Leave me, and go and get out that bawling Dutchman: he ain't dead, and I am."

As it proved, he was broken all to pieces, both legs and both arms being fractured, one of the arms in two places.

Of course Dr. Lively found the hearts he went to seek, not only among the favored few whom God had spared the bitter cup, but all over the world. We all know the beautiful story--how all the cities and villages and hamlets of the land were on the housetops, watching the burning of Chicago, marking her needs, and speeding the relief as fast as steam and lightning could bring it. We know of that message of love, the sweetest, the most wonderful the world ever heard since Christ died for us. Through the pallid stupefaction, the sullen silence, the awful gloom, the black despair that were settling over Chicago's heart, it pierced, and from all the world it came: "We have heard thy cry, O our sister! Our hearts are aching for thee; our tears are flowing for thee; our hands are working for thee." Oh, how it electrified us in Chicago! If any refused, if any gave grudgingly, we saw it not, we knew it not. We saw only the eager outstretched hand of love.

And we know now the sequel of the wonderful story--how Chicago has proved herself worthy of the great love wherewith the world hath loved her, and of the great faith wherewith the world hath believed in her. She has come up out of her bereavement strong through suffering, wearing yet her badge of mourning, her face subdued, but uplifted, wise and strong of purpose; her eye sad, but earnest and true; her figure less imperious, but majestic and regal; her spirit less arrogant, but just as brave, just as heroic, and more human.

SARAH WINTER KELLOGG.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A STRAYED SINGER.

Most of us know what a pathos is mixed with the sweet surprise of meeting a beautiful thing in strange and inferior surroundings, in circumstances that suggest an utter incongruity between the subject and the situation, and imply an awful weight of loneliness and an intolerable lack of sympathy. The Alpine harebell on the edge of the glacier, the caged lion gazing vacantly into a wearisome monotony of idleness, the shivering little Italian fiddling about our winter streets, make the same appeal, in various measure, to this consciousness of incongruity that in another phase would stimulate our laughter instead of our tears.

As with space, so with time. It is the appreciation of the discord between the subject and its surroundings that awakens our sympathy for men "born out of their time," as we express it with an arrogance of wiser judgment. In every period of history, affronting the great averages of intellectual development, appear certain minds classified at once as being either before or behind their age. To the first class belong the great reformers, discoverers, inventors--men whose immense genius, concentrated upon one idea, carries them beyond their fellows, as a straight-going steamer distances a pleasure-yacht. These men we do not think of pitying, unless they come too near us, and then we call them fools or fanatics.

But there are lost children of the second class whose fate we all deplore--children of an earlier age or a summer clime, drifting about in this laborious world like helpless babes in the wood; bright-eyed, luxurious young Greeks, rebelling against pain and intolerant of toil, struggling in vain to hold their own among keen, restless Yankees; dreamy mystics, strayed from the shadows of some cloister, their vague eyes dazzled by the sun; artists of early Italy, worshiping the mediæval Madonna; poets, belonging of right to the court of Elizabeth, or companions of the wandering and disastrous fortunes of "the fairest and crudest of princesses."

It is of an Elizabethan poet strayed into our Victorian age that I propose to write. Few people except professed students of literature know more of Thomas Lovell Beddoes than his name. More than a year ago an article on him appeared in the _Fortnightly_, half biographical, half occupied with a sketch of his principal tragedy--an article doing more justice to the dramatic than to the lyric quality of his genius. But it is by his songs that his name is kept in the minds of men to-day--exquisite snatches of melody, full of the peculiar charm of that Elizabethan age to which they properly belong.

In 1851 an edition of his poems in two volumes, with a memoir and letters, was published by Pickering. The edition was small and soon exhausted, but the literary world of England was unanimous in its praise; and Landor, Browning, Proctor, and many others came out with generous tributes to the genius of that poet whose circle of listeners has always been so small. "Nearly two centuries have elapsed," wrote Walter Savage Landor, with his hearty enthusiasm, "since a work of the same wealth of genius as _Death's Jest-Book_ has been given to the world." And Browning wrote to Mr. Kelsall, the author of the memoir: "You might pick out scenes, passages, lyrics, fine as fine can be: the power of the man is immense and irresistible."

The two volumes contain, besides the Life and letters, two dramas, _The Brides' Tragedy_ and _Death's Jest-Book_, two unfinished plays, _Torrismond_ and _The Second Brother_, and many dramatic and poetic fragments and songs. The Life is an uneventful history, but the letters, though singularly free from egotism, bring up before us a most interesting character--a curious mixture of genius and want of faith in that genius, of energy and self-distrust, of intense devotion to practical studies and the most impractical and dreamy fancy, an affectionate nature lonely and misunderstood, a spirit of the most sturdy and uncompromising independence, a mind of keen and scientific insight--a character made up, in short, of all the warring elements of philosopher, physician, politician and poet.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Clifton in 1803, and died at Bâle in Switzerland in 1849. His mother was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, and his father a distinguished physician and an intimate friend of Sir Humphry Davy. In the father's character we may trace the principal traits of the son: a strong scientific bent, a fondness for poetic dreams, an invincible independence, were predominant in both. The character of Lovell Beddoes' poetry was the natural outgrowth of his early studies. His schoolfellows at the Charterhouse speak of him at the age of fourteen as already thoroughly versed in the best English literature and a close student of the dramatists, from the Elizabethan to those of his own day. He was always ready to invent and carry out any acts of insubordination, which he informed with so much wit and spirit that the very authorities were often subdued by their own irresistible laughter. It was one phase of his dramatic genius, that seemed to be constantly impelling him to get up some striking situation wherein he might pose as a youthful Ajax defying the lightnings. At Oxford his restless independence was continually prompting him to affront his tutors. He was always in opposition to the spirit of the occasion, whatever it might be.

This spirit of rebellion inspired him with an intense interest in German literature and German politics, as representing the ultra-liberal tendencies of the day. Shelley, too, the rejected of Oxford, whose name was scarcely to be mentioned to the British Philistine of the moment, was one of Beddoes' idols, and he joined with two other gentlemen in the expense of printing the first edition of the poet's posthumous works in 1824, afterward withdrawn by Mrs. Shelley. Byron was the popular poet then, and universal Young England was turning down its shirt-collars in a mockery of woe. But this boy of twenty, with his sturdy independence, would judge for himself, and wrote to a friend: "I saw ---- (the greatest fool within the walls of my acquaintance) the other night at Oxford, repeating the whole of the _Deformed_ in raptures. God forgive him!"

In 1821, while yet a freshman, he published a little volume of poems called _The Improvisatore_, of which he was soon ashamed. Long before he left Oxford he used to hunt the unfortunate volume through the libraries of his acquaintance, and cutting out all the pages leave the binding intact, a hollow mockery, upon their shelves. The next year, however, he published _The Brides' Tragedy_, a drama of very great originality and power, and a most extraordinary production for a boy of nineteen. The _Edinburgh Review_ and the _London Magazine_. then at the height of their power, came out with critical and highly laudatory notices by Proctor (Barry Cornwall) and George Darley, and the former was ever after one of Beddoes' warmest personal friends. In July, 1825, he went to Göttingen, where his brilliant achievements as a student of medicine won him numerous honors. The rest of his life was spent in Germany and Switzerland, with occasional brief visits to England, but his heart was with the German radicals, and he found the united attractions of science, liberalism and Swiss scenery far more powerful than love of his native land. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the discussion of the scientific and political questions of the day, soon became a master of the language, wrote a great deal for the German newspapers, both in prose and verse, and used jestingly to call himself "a popular German poet."

About this time he began his finest tragedy, _Death's Jest-Book_, still undergoing correction and revision at the time of his death in his forty-sixth year. He was never weary of making alterations: never satisfied with the result of his labors, he tore up scene after scene, or struck out remorselessly the finest passage in a drama if he thought it inharmonious with the context. He had a theory that no man should devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary powers of imagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the mind, and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery science was slowly feeling its way.

As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the arcana of anatomy and physiology his judgment of his own poetry grew more and more severe. The more he knew of Truth, the nearer absolute perfection must that Beauty be which would compete with her for his heart. Busy with a pursuit in which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty could not disown, he shrank from trying to reach vague eminences in poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but who has still a lingering affection for the land of dreams--as yet, at least, not far enough in the journey of science to have lost sight of the old two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits and ways of thinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would have never swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had devoted their lives to literature, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth--men beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior poetical feeling and genius--had done so little, you must give me leave to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and should congratulate me on having chosen Göttingen instead of Grub street for my abode.... It is good to be tolerable or intolerable in any other line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!"

There are so many racy bits of anecdote and opinion scattered through this correspondence, so many things worth keeping for their own sakes or as throwing new light upon the character of their writer, that it is hard to choose a single specimen, but with one more extract we must strive to be content. Beddoes' friend and editor had been trying to get from him some personal details about his daily life, pursuits and fancies, which, with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological self-portraiture," he writes, "fearing--and I believe with sufficient reason--to be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result of mere vanity--not excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseau--falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks out now and then indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some very disagreeable truth of some other person; and then, re-established in his own good opinion, marches on cheerfully in the smooth path toward the temple of his own immortality. Yet even here, you see, I am indirectly lauding my own worship for not being persuaded to laud my own worship. How sleek, smooth-tongued, paradisaical a deluder art thou, sweet Self-conceit! Let great men give their own thoughts on their own thoughts: from such we can learn much; but let the small deer hold jaw, and remember what the philosopher says, 'Fleas are not lobsters: d----n their souls!'"

Caring nothing even for professional honors, Beddoes refused various professorships in Germany, and traveled about to Zurich, to Bâle, and to the other German centres of learning as his desires prompted him. Always the same independent and rebellious spirit that he had shown himself as a boy, he sympathized warmly with the democratic movements then agitating Switzerland and the Rhine provinces, and devoted both his purse and his pen to aid the anti-oligarchic and anti-clerical party. In 1848 he had intended to go back to England, but in the spring of that year a slight wound received while dissecting infused a poison into his system that undermined his health. In May, while seeking restoration in the purer air of Bâle, his horse fell with him, and his left leg was so badly broken that amputation became necessary. Until the autumn he seemed to be doing well, but then the poison imbibed at Frankfort declared itself once more, and a slow fever set in which terminated in death on the 26th of January, 1849.

Beddoes' great fault as a dramatist he was quite aware of himself, and had pointed out to the friend who was continually urging him to write: "The power of drawing character and humor--two things absolutely indispensable for a good dramatist--are the first two articles in my deficiencies; and even the imaginative poetry I think you will find in all my verse always harping on the same two or three principles; for which plain and satisfactory reasons I have no business to expect any great distinction as a writer." He could draw types of character, but not individuals: the power of making the creations of the mind seem as real as "our dear intimates and chamber-fellows" was denied him. But he was not wholly destitute of humor, though he was possessed of but one kind--that grim, sardonic quality which we find so often among the Elizabethans--that mocking irony most like the grin upon a skull. His fools are his best characters, so far as strength and originality go. Here is a snatch from the wise conversation of two of these worthies in _Death's Jest-Book_:

"_Isbrand._ Good-morrow, Brother Vanity! How? soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim, how art thou transmuted! Wilt thou desert our brotherhood, fool sublimate? Shall the motley chapter no longer boast thee? Wilt thou forswear the order of the bell, and break thy vows to Momus? Have mercy on Wisdom and relent.

"_Mandrake._ Respect the grave and sober, I pray thee. To-morrow I know thee not. In truth, I mark that our noble faculty is in its last leaf. The dry rot of prudence hath eaten the ship of fools to dust: she is no more seaworthy. The world will see its ears in a glass no longer. So we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of asses come but once a year, when all the days are foaled of one mother? O world! world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's sign is taken down.

"_Isbrand._ Farewell, thou great-eared mind! I mark, by thy talk, that thou commencest philosopher, and then thou art only a fellow-servant out of livery."

Isbrand is the brother of the slain knight Wolfram: his foolery is but the disguise of his revenge, and thus he rails over the body of his brother: "Dead and gone! a scurvy burden to this ballad of life. There lies he, Siegfried--my brother, mark you--and I weep not, nor gnash the teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this? So should every honest man be--cold, dead, and leaden-coffined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and the pole wanders; one who would be immortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. That is constancy, that is life. O moral Nature!"

It is unnecessary to try to describe the plot of this strange drama, if plot it may be called. The poem rather resembles the old bridge at Lucerne with the gloomy figures of the Dance of Death painted along its wormeaten sides, while over its old timbers rolls the current of busy life, and the laughter of children echoes from its roof. With the exception of Isbrand, the characters of the play are pale and shadowy enough, but the poetry that they speak is wonderful. The gloom and tender beauty of the verse are inextricably united, as in the plays of Webster, whose "intellectual twin" Beddoes might have been. Here is a lovely sketch of "a melancholy lady:"

_Duke._ Thorwald, I fear hers is a broken heart.
When first I met her in the Egyptian prison,
She was the rosy morning of a woman:
Beauty was rising, but the starry grace
Of a calm childhood might be seen in her.
But since the death of Wolfram, who fell there,
Heaven and one single soul only know how,
I have not dared to look upon her sorrow.

_Thorwald._ Methinks she's too unearthly beautiful.
Old as I am, I cannot look at her,
And hear her voice, that touches the heart's core,
Without a dread that she will fade o' th' instant.
There's too much heaven in her; oft it rises,
And, pouring out about the lovely earth,
Almost dissolves it. She is tender too;
And melancholy is the sweet pale smile
With which she gently does reproach her fortune

But the greatest beauty of this singular poem, with its wild medley of jesters and spirits, knights and fiends, Deaths and tender women, "like flowers on a grave," is the wonderful perfection of its songs. There are no less than thirteen in this play, some of them the wild mockery remind us of their faults. A turgid inflation in the tragic passages, a tendency to bombast, even more apparent in the man of forty-six than in the boy of nineteen, mar the calm strength of many of his scenes. The cloying sweetness that overloaded the verses of his juvenile work he left behind him as he grew older, but the Marlowe-like extravagance that noted in the soliloquies of _Hesperus_ still comes to the surface occasionally in the pages of _Death's Jest-Book_. It is the extravagance of strength, however, not of weakness.

It is not often that we see a poet giving up the glorious race from sheer distrust of his power to win, but such was the case of Beddoes. A want of faith in his own genius was for ever paralyzing his hand. To succeed, as he himself knew but too well, and as he wrote to his editor, "a man must have an exclusive passion for his art, and all the obstinacy and self-denial which is combined with such a temperament--an unconquerable and always enduring will, always working forward to the only goal he knows." This singleness of purpose Beddoes never possessed. Inheriting from his father the qualities of both poet and physician, the faculties of the scientific man, trained and cultivated through a long life by Dr. Thomas Beddoes (with whom poetry was but an occasional pastime), seem to have overbalanced and diverted the poetic genius of his son. The hereditary instinct overcame the individual bent. And in spite of Lovell Beddoes' opinion that "the studies of the dramatist and physician are closely, almost inseparably, allied," is it not true that the analytical faculty so essential to the latter is rarely found in connection with great creative ability? Sainte-Beuve never forgave Balzac for saying that critics were unsuccessful authors, but he should have consoled himself with the of the jesters, but many of them very beautiful; and there are three more in _The Brides' Tragedy_. Since the days of Elizabeth we have had nothing to compare with them. They have that delicate poise of beauty, like the lighting of a butterfly on a bending flower, that adds to our delight the keen sense of its transitoriness. Here is one--"a voice from the waters:"

The swallow leaves her nest,
The soul my weary breast;
But therefore let the rain
On my grave
Fall pure; for why complain?
Since both will come again
O'er the wave.

The wind dead leaves and snow
Doth hurry to and fro;
And once a day shall break
O'er the wave,
When a storm of ghosts shall shake
The dead, until they wake
In the grave.

This is the least Elizabethan of them all, perhaps, in sentiment, but it has an exquisite sombre tenderness and music of its own. Then follows one of the finest of all Beddoes' songs, a dirge, beginning--

If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;

which it is useless to quote entire, because it may be found in Dana's _Household Poetry_, and in the best collection of songs we have, R. H. Stoddard's _Melodies and Madrigals_, wherein are enshrined three of Beddoes' dirges, all from this one drama of _Death's Jest-Book_.

The second volume of Beddoes' poems also contains _The Brides' Tragedy_, written when he was but nineteen. More simple and coherent in plot and construction than the other drama, it has more sweetness and less strength. It is full of the innocence of love, and rich with that prodigality of beauty with which youthful genius loves to make itself splendid. It begins with a scene in a garden, and "while that wingèd song, the restless nightingale, turns her sad heart to music," two lovers talk of flowers and love and dreams--dreams of the Queen of Smiles, and her attendant mob of Loves, busy with their various tasks:

Here stood one alone,
Blowing a pyre of blazing lovers' hearts
With bellows full of absence-caused sighs:
Near him his work-mate mended broken vows
With dangerous gold, or strung soft rhymes together
Upon a lady's tress.... And one there was alone,
Who with wet downcast eyelids threw aside
The remnants of a broken heart, and looked
Into my face and bid me 'ware of love,
Of fickleness, and woe, and mad despair.

There are beautiful scenes and passages all through the play, the passion and the terror smacking somewhat of youth, perhaps, that loves to pile up agonies, but the poetry still so fine that one continually forgets to say, This is the work of a boy of nineteen. There is no need to say it, in fact: it is a work of genius, and demands no extenuation. There is a scene between Olivia and her attendants, as they prepare her for her bridal, that has a sustained and tender sweetness and calm about it hard to be matched in all our modern drama. For the same Olivia is sung this lovely

SONG, BY TWO VOICES.

_First Voice._ Who is the baby that doth lie
Beneath the silken canopy
Of thy blue eye?

_Second Voice._ It is young Sorrow laid asleep
In the crystal deep.

_Both._ Let us sing his lullaby,
Heigho! a sob and a sigh.

_First Voice._ What sound is that, so soft, so clear,
Harmonious as a bubbled tear
Bursting, we hear?

_Second Voice._ It is young Sorrow, slumber breaking,
Suddenly waking.

_Both._ Let us sing his lullaby,
Heigho! a sob and a sigh.

They are not all dirges, these beautiful scraps of melody. Sometimes we come upon one as blithe as sunshine, like this serenade from the fine fragment called _The Second Brother_:

Strike, you myrtle-crownèd boys,
Ivied maidens, strike together:
Magic lutes are these whose noise
Our fingers gather,
Threaded thrice with golden strings
From Cupid's bow:
And the sounds of its sweet voice
Not air, but little busy things,
Pinioned with the lightest feather
Of his wings,
Rising up at every blow
Round the chords, like flies from roses
Zephyr-touched; so these light minions
Hover round, then shut their pinions,
And drop into the air, that closes
Where music's sweetest sweet reposes.

There is a song worthy of Ariel, whose delicate involutions well repay study, and whose perfect melody carries along the unfolding of the thought as easily and lightly as a swift stream sweeps along scattered rose-leaves. And here is another of the same dainty complexion, but simpler:

How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new-fall'n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:
So many times do I love thee, dear.

How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unraveled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:
So many times do I love again.

Nor is it only the songs of Beddoes that ought to keep his memory alive among us, if his dramas are too long to enchain our fickle attention. We turn over the small collection of fragments that his stern judgment has spared from the material of his two finished plays, to come across thoughts like these, that would have made the best part of some less severe critic's pages:

I know not whether
I see your meaning: if I do, it lies
Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice
Dim as the evening shadow in a brook,
When the least moon has silver on't no larger
Than the pure white of Hebe's pinkish nail.

And many voices marshaled in one hymn
Wound through the night, whose still, translucent moments
Lay on each side their breath; and the hymn passed
Its long harmonious populace of words
Between the silvery silences.

Luckless man
Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,
And flinching from the insect's little sting,
In pitiful security keeps watch,
While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun.
To which he prays, comes windless Pestilence,
Transparent as a glass of poisoned water
Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling:
She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,
Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,
And every breath of hers as full of ghosts
As a sunbeam with motes.

There is an old saying that the workman may be known by his chips: surely from these chips we may gather a high opinion of that artificer who left such fragments to testify for him. For imaginative power of a very high order, for the true tragic spirit, for exquisitely melodious versification, for that faculty of song which is the flower of the lyric genius, Beddoes was pre-eminently distinguished. Nor for these alone. His style is based upon the rich vocabulary of the old dramatists, and is terse, pregnant and quaint, without any trace of affectation. There was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which infuses such bitter strength into the speeches of Isbrand was always scoffing at his own verses, and nipping the blossoms of his genius in the bud. "I believe I might have met with some success as a retailer of small coal," he writes to Mr. Kelsall, "or a writer of long-bottomed tracts, but doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial occupation."

His greatest weakness as a writer of tragedy has already been mentioned as one of which he was himself but too well aware--his inability to create characters that should have any more individual existence than as the mouthpieces of various sentiments. While holding that the proper aim of the dramatic writer should be to write for the stage, his dramas are nevertheless fitted only for the closet. "If it were possible," said George Darley (in the _London Magazine_, December, 1823), "speaking of a work of this kind (_The Brides' Tragedy_), to make a distinction between the _vis tragica_ and the _vis dramatica_, I should say that he possessed much of the former, but little of the latter." As the beauties of his style--and they are many--recall to us the Shakespearian writers and the matchless riches of their verse, so do its faults--which are few--reflection that the author was unsuccessful because the critic was great. All critics, however, do not aspire to create, but all poets sooner or later attempt to criticise. Baudelaire, "the illustrious poet, the faultless critic," as Swinburne calls him, went still further. He said: "Tous les grands poëtes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je plains les poëtes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois incomplets. Il serait prodigieux qu'un critique devînt poëte, et il est impossible qu'un poëte ne contienne pas un critique." Yet a man cannot serve two masters, and Art is a jealous mistress who will not brook a rival. Even Beddoes found that his ideal of the physiologist-poet was fast slipping through his fingers, and confessed at last that were he "soberly and mathematically convinced" of his own inspiration, he would give himself up to the cultivation of literature. But he died at the early age of forty-six, from the effects of a wound received in the cause of Science. A singular retribution befell him, a truly poetic justice: all his scientific writings have disappeared--were either stolen before his executors had time to examine his papers, or had been destroyed by his own ruthless hand--and all that was left to keep his memory alive were the two tragedies and the few scattered fragments of verse of which he had made so little account during his lifetime. Their circle of readers has necessarily been small, but choice. There are few left, besides Browning and Proctor and John Forster, of his original admirers, and his name seems to be another on the long list of those who have failed, as the world counts failure. But the poets know better, and among their undying brotherhood space will always be kept for this strayed singer.

KATE HILLARD.

HARVEST.

Gray orchards starred with fruitage gold and red,
Field beyond field of yellow-tasseled corn,
Rippling responsive to each breath of morn.
Along the Southern wall the dark vines shed
Their splendid clusters, blue-black and pale green,
With liquid sunshine through their thin films seen.
In yonder mead the haymakers at work
With lusty sounds the clear tense air fulfill,
Rearing the shapely hayrick's mimic hill,
The dried grass tossing with light-wielded fork.

Daylong the reapers glean the bladed gold;
High to the topmost orchard branches climb
The apple-gatherers, and from each limb
Shake the ripe globes of sweetness, downward rolled
Upon the leaf-strewn ground; and all day long
From the near vineyard comes the merry song
Of those who prune the stocks and tread the press.
The spirit melts beneath the mastering sense
Of supreme beauty and beneficence,
Power divine and awful gentleness.

No space for sadness in the heart to-day,
Seeing the generous, faithful earth fulfill
The springtide promise of vine, field and hill
When bush and hedge were rosy-flushed with May.
Yet at the threshold of fruition fain
We pause to catch the savor once again
Of sweet expectancy. The perfect year
In fourfold beauty rounds itself at length,
With golden fullness of developed strength,
Into the sure, complete, unswerving sphere.

This the result of frozen winter-rains,
Of hard, white snows, of dull, loud-dripping thaw,
Of showers and shine of spring, of March blasts raw,
Of glaring August heats,--these dainty grains,
This fruitage delicate. O sluggard soul!
What harvest reapest thou as seasons roll?
Mayhap to thee the slow results of time
Bring also profit, though thy fruit, hung high,
Escape the glance of careless passers-by,
A seeming fragile husk of empty rhyme.

Yet there are those who know what fed the root,
What long, dull tedium as of wintry hours,
What rapture as of spring-light after showers,
Went to the ripening of this strange, frail fruit.
Defeat and hope, disaster, joy and pain,
Grief, pleasure and despair--the same old train
That follows every soul. No grafted seed,
No alien harvest this, but a true part
Of the whole being--soul and pulse and heart--
That from the living bough is lightly freed.

EMMA LAZARUS.

ORCO.

FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGE SAND.

We were as usual assembled in the arbor. The evening was stormy, the air heavy and the sky charged with black clouds furrowed with frequent lightnings. We were keeping a melancholy silence, as if the gloom of the atmosphere had reached our hearts, disposing us involuntarily to tears. Beppa, particularly, seemed given up to sorrowful thoughts. In vain had the abbé, alarmed at the disposition of the company, tried several times and in every way to reanimate the gayety, usually so sparkling, of our friend. Neither questions, teasing nor entreaties succeeded in drawing her from her reverie: her eyes fixed on the sky, her fingers wandering carelessly over the trembling strings of her guitar, she seemed not to notice what was going on around her, and to be thinking of nothing but the plaintive sounds she caused her instrument to utter, and the capricious course of the clouds.

The good Panorio, disheartened by the ill success of his attempts, took the resolution of addressing himself to me. "Come, dear Zorze," said he, "try in thy turn the power of thy affection upon this capricious beauty. There exists between you two a sort of magnetic sympathy stronger than all my reasoning, and the sound of thy voice succeeds in drawing her from her deepest distraction."

"This magnetic sympathy of which thou speakest to me," I answered, "comes, dear abbé, from the identity of our feelings. We have suffered in the same way and thought the same things, and we know each other well enough, she and I, to know what sort of ideas external circumstances recall to each. I wager that I can guess, not the subject, but at least the nature, of her reverie." And turning toward Beppa, "_Carissima_," I said gently, "of which of our sisters art thou thinking?"

"Of the most beautiful," she answered without turning round, "of the proudest, the most unfortunate."

"When did she die?" I continued, already interested in her who lived in the memory of my noble friend, and desiring to associate myself by my regrets with a destiny which could not be strange to me.

"She died at the close of last winter, on the night of the ball at the palace Servilio. She had resisted many sorrows, she had come forth victorious from many dangers, had suffered, without succumbing, terrible agonies, and died suddenly without leaving any trace, as if carried off by a thunderbolt. Every one here knew her more or less, but no one so well as I, because none loved her so much, and she only let herself be known according as she was loved. Others do not believe in her death, although she has not appeared since the night of which I tell thee: they say it has often happened that she has disappeared thus for a long time, and returned again afterward. But _I_ know that she will never come back any more, and that her part upon the earth is finished. If I wished to doubt it I could not: she took care to let me know the fatal truth through him who was the cause of her death. And what a misfortune was that! O God! the greatest misfortune of our unhappy age! Such a beautiful life was hers! so beautiful and so full of contrasts! so illustrious, so mysterious, so sad, so magnificent, so enthusiastic, so austere, so voluptuous, so complete in its resemblance to all human things! No: no life and no death were like hers. She had found means of suppressing all the pitiful realities of her existence, leaving only its poetry. Faithful to the old customs of the national aristocracy, she only showed herself after the close of the day, masked, but never followed by any one. There is not an inhabitant of the city who has not met her wandering in the squares or in the streets--not one who has not noticed her gondola moored in some canal, but no one ever saw it enter or go out. Although this gondola was watched by no one, it was never known to have been the object of an attempt at theft. It was painted and equipped like all other gondolas, yet every one knew it. Even the children said, on seeing it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask.' As to the way in which it moved, and the place from which it brought its mistress at night, and to which it carried her back in the morning, no one could even suspect it. The revenue-cruisers had, indeed, often seen a black shadow upon the lagoons, and, taking it for a contraband boat, had given chase to it as far as the open sea, but when morning came they never saw upon the waves anything resembling the object of their pursuit; and finally they fell into the way of not minding it, and of saying when they saw it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask again.'

"At night the Mask traversed the whole city, seeking no one knew what. She was seen by turns in the broadest squares and in the most crooked streets, on bridges and under the arches of tall palaces, in the most frequented places and the most deserted. She went sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, without appearing to notice the crowd or the solitude, but never stopping. She seemed to contemplate with passionate curiosity the houses, the monuments, the canals, and even the sky above the city, and to breathe with delight the air which circulated through it. When she met a friendly person, she signed to him to follow her, and soon disappeared with him. More than once she has led me thus from the midst of the crowd, and has conversed with me of the things we loved. I followed her with confidence, for I knew we were friends; but many of those to whom she signaled did not dare respond to her invitation. Strange stories circulated about her, and froze the courage of the most intrepid. It was said that several young men, thinking they discovered a woman beneath this mask and this black dress, became enamored of her, as much for the singularity and mystery of her life as for her beautiful form and noble appearance--that having had the imprudence to follow her, they had never reappeared. The police, having even noticed that these young men were all Austrians, had brought all their manoeuvres into use to discover them, and get possession of her who was accused as the cause of their disappearance. But the _sbirri_ were not more fortunate than the revenue-officers, and were never able to learn anything about the young foreigners or to lay hands upon _her_. A strange incident had discouraged the most ardent spies of the Venetian Inquisition. Finding that it was impossible to seize the Mask by night in Venice, two of the most zealous of the police resolved to wait for her in her own gondola, so as to capture her when she should enter it to row away. One evening, when they saw it moored to the Quay dei Schiavi, they got into it and concealed themselves. They remained there all night without hearing or seeing any one, but an hour before day they thought they perceived that some one was untying the boat. They rose silently and prepared to fall upon their prey, but at the same instant a terrible push capsized the gondola and the unlucky agents of Austrian rule. One of them was drowned, and the other only owed his life to aid brought him by the smugglers. The next day there was no trace of the boat, and the police were forced to believe it submerged, but in the evening it was seen moored in the same place and in the same condition as the night before. Then a superstitious terror took possession of the police, and not one of them was willing to make the same attempt a second time. After that day they no longer sought to disturb the Mask, who continued her excursions as in the past.

"In the beginning of last autumn there came to the garrison here an Austrian officer named Count Franz Lichtenstein. He was an enthusiastic, passionate young man, who had within him the germ of all great sentiments and an instinct for noble thoughts. In spite of his bad education as a great lord, he had been able to preserve his mind from all prejudices, and to keep in his heart a reverence for liberty. His position forced him to dissimulate in public his ideas and tastes, but as soon as his duties were performed he hastened to throw off his uniform, which seemed to him a badge of all the vices of the government he served, and hurried to meet the friends whom his goodness and intelligence had procured for him in the city. We loved particularly to hear him speak of Venice. He had seen it as an artist, had deplored its servitude, and had come to love it as much as a Venetian. He never wearied of traversing it night and day, and of admiring it. He wished, he said, to know it better than those whose good fortune it was to have been born there. In his nocturnal rambles he encountered the Mask. At first he paid no great attention to her, but having soon noticed that she appeared to study the city with the same curiosity as himself, he was struck with this strange coincidence, and spoke of it to several persons. They related to him the stories which were afloat concerning the veiled woman, and advised him to beware of her. But, as he was brave even to rashness, these warnings, instead of frightening him, excited his curiosity, and inspired him with a mad desire to make the acquaintance of the mysterious personage who so terrified the vulgar. Wishing to keep toward the Mask the same incognito which she preserved toward him, he dressed himself as a citizen and continued his nocturnal excursions. He was not long in meeting what he sought. He saw under a beautiful moonlight the masked woman standing before the charming church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. She seemed to contemplate with adoration the delicate ornaments which decorated its portal. The count silently and slowly approached her. She did not appear to notice him, and did not stir. The count, who had stopped a moment to see if he were discovered, moved on again and came close to her. He heard her utter a profound sigh, and as he knew Venetian very badly, but Italian very well, he addressed her in pure Tuscan. 'Salutation,' said he--'salutation and happiness to those who love Venice.'

"'Who are you?' replied the Mask, with a voice full and sonorous as a man's, but sweet as a nightingale's.

"'I am a lover of beauty.'

"'Are you one of those whose brutal love does violence to free beauty, or of those who kneel before captive beauty and weep for its sorrows?'

"'When the king of the night sees the rose flourish joyously beneath the breath of the breeze, he flaps his wings and sings: when he sees her wither beneath the hurrying blast of the storm, he hides his head under his wing and shudders. Thus does my love.'

"'Follow me, then, for thou art one of the faithful.' And grasping the young man's hand, she drew him toward the church. When he felt the cold hand of the unknown press his, and saw her move with him toward the sombre depth of the portal, involuntarily he recalled the fearful stories he had heard, and, seized with a sudden terror, he stopped. The Mask turned, and fixing a scornful look on the pale face of her companion, said to him, 'You are afraid? Adieu.' Then loosing his arm she hastened away.

"The count was ashamed of his weakness, and rushing after her, in his turn seized her hand, saying, 'No, I am not afraid. Come!' Without answering, she continued her walk. But instead of going toward the church, as at first, she turned into one of the little streets which lead into the square. The moon was hidden, and the most complete obscurity reigned over the city. Franz hardly saw where he placed his foot, and could distinguish nothing in the deep shadows which enfolded him on all sides. He followed at random his guide, who seemed, on the contrary, to know her way perfectly well. From time to time a few beams gliding across the clouds came to show Franz the edge of a canal, a bridge, an arch or some unknown part of a labyrinth of deep and tortuous streets: then everything relapsed into darkness. Franz soon discovered that he was lost in Venice, and that he was at the mercy of his guide, but he resolved to brave everything. He showed no uneasiness, and let himself be led along without making an observation.