Chapter M: ARNOLD (The Strayed Reveller)

* * * * *

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

COLERIDGE (_The Ancient Mariner_).

The above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85.)

* * * * *

We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom; and certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man—not only in point of honesty, but in point of ability.

BACON.

* * * * *

Cunning, being the ape of wisdom, is the most distant from it that can be. And as an ape for the likeness it has to a man—wanting what really should make him so—is by so much the uglier, cunning is only the want of understanding, which, because it cannot compass its ends by direct ways, would do it by a trick and circumvention.

JOHN LOCKE (_Some Thoughts Concerning Education_, 1693).

* * * * *

A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool _in circumbendibus_.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

* * * * *

It is only by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown men can distinguish well-rolled barrels from more supernal thunder.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Mill on the Floss_).

* * * * *

Let its teaching (the teaching of scientific and other books of information, the “literature of knowledge”) be even partially revised, let it be expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power (poetry and what is generally known as _literature_), surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men.... The Iliad, the Prometheus of Æschylus—the Othello or King Lear—the Hamlet or Macbeth—and the Paradise Lost, are triumphant for ever, as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never _can_ transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce _these_ in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.

DE QUINCEY (_Alexander Pope_).

De Quincey’s division of literature into “literature of
power” and “literature of knowledge” still remains a useful
classification.

* * * * *

A man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is in him.

SYDNEY SMITH.

* * * * *

How brew the brave drink, Life?
Take of the herb hight morning joy,
Take of the herb hight evening rest,
Pour in pain, lest bliss should cloy,
Shake in sin to give it zest—
Then down with the brave drink, Life!

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

I had this attributed to Robert Burton, but cannot find it in
the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. It may possibly be from Richard
Brathwaite, whose works I think were at one time attributed to
Burton; but I have no opportunity of consulting them.

* * * * *

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good work, therefore, I can do or show to any fellow creature, let me do it now! Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

WILLIAM PENN.

I find that there has been much discussion in _Notes and
Queries_ and elsewhere as to the origin of this quotation, and
it is now usually attributed to the French-American Quaker,
Stephen Grellet. As, however, Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_
gives “I shall not pass this way again” as a favourite saying
of William Penn’s, it seems more reasonable to consider him the
author of the above.

* * * * *

Youth is a blunder, Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

DISRAELI (_Coningsby_).

* * * * *

She went into the garden to cut a cabbage to make an apple pie. Just then, a great she-bear coming down the street poked its nose into the shop-window. “What! no soap?” So he died, and she (very imprudently) married the barber. And there were present at the wedding the Joblillies, and the Piccannies, and the Gobelites, and the great Panjandrum himself, with the little button on top. So they all set to playing Catch-who-catch-can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

SAMUEL FOOTE, 1720-1777.

Charles Macklin (1699-1797), actor and playwright, said in a
lecture on oratory that by practice he had brought his memory
to such perfection that he could learn anything by rote on
once hearing or reading it. Foote (a more important dramatist
and actor) wrote out the above and handed it up to Macklin to
read and then repeat from memory! The passage was very familiar
to us from Miss Edgeworth’s _Harry and Lucy_; and also from
_Verdant Green_, by Cuthbert Bede (Edward Bradley) where it was
set in the bogus examination paper “To be turned into Latin
after the manner of the Animals of Tacitus.”

* * * * *

You feel o’er you stealing
The old familiar, warm, champagny, brandy-punchy, feeling.

J. R. LOWELL (_Old College Rooms_).

* * * * *

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat
One’s self.

P. J. BAILEY (_Festus_, “_Anywhere_”).

* * * * *

Truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be regarded as their most serious actions.

MONTAIGNE.

* * * * *

Boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the United States.

R. L. STEVENSON (_The Lantern-Bearers_).

* * * * *

Says Chloe, “Though tears it may cost,
It is time we should part, my dear Sue;
For _your_ character’s totally lost,
And _I’ve_ not sufficient for two!”

ANON.

This was taken from a poor collection of epigrams by C. S.
Carey (1872), no author being given. Andrew Lang quoted it in
his Presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research,
and it was duly inscribed in the Proceedings. I, with some
diffidence, follow an illustrious example.

* * * * *

I cannot say, in Eastern style,
Where’er she treads the pansy blows;
Nor call her eyes twin-stars, her smile
A sunbeam, and her mouth a rose.
Nor can I, as your bridegrooms do,
Talk of my raptures. Oh, how sore
The fond romance of twenty-two
Is parodied ere thirty-four!

To-night I shake hands with the past,—
Familiar years, adieu, adieu!
An unknown door is open cast,
An empty future wide and new
Stands waiting. O ye naked rooms,
Void, desolate, without a charm,
Will Love’s smile chase your lonely glooms,
And drape your walls, and make them warm?

ALEXANDER SMITH (1830-1867) (_The Night before
the Wedding_).

In my notes, this strange poem is stated to have been actually
written by Smith on the night before his wedding; but it is
difficult to believe this. In the poem, the poet sits until
dawn on his wedding-eve thinking of the “long-lost passions of
his youth,” and comparing them with his calm and unimpassioned
love, “pale blossom of the snow,” for the bride of the morrow.
He even fears that his wife’s tenderness will keep alive the
memories of his youthful loves:

It may be that your loving wiles
Will call a sigh from far-off years;
It may be that your happiest smiles
Will brim my eyes with hopeless tears;
It may be that my sleeping breath
Will shake with painful visions wrung;
And, in the awful trance of death,
A stranger’s name be on my tongue.

This is sufficiently gruesome. However he finally comes to
the conclusion (although it seems dragged in to save a very
difficult situation) that his love for his future bride may
become more satisfactory to him:

For, as the dawning sweet and fast
Through all the heaven spreads and flows,
Within life’s discord rude and vast
Love’s subtle music grows and grows.

My love, pale blossom of the snow,
Has pierced earth, wet with wintry showers—
O may it drink the sun, and blow,
And be followed by all the year of flowers!

Smith, with P. J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell and others, belonged to
what was called the “Spasmodic” school which the _Britannica_
says is “now fallen into oblivion.” I do not know what this
means. Smith, Bailey, and Dobell no doubt wrote extravagantly,
but they have all written good verses. Take for example the
following from Smith’s first poem, “_A Life Drama_,” written at
twenty-two years of age:

All things have something more than barren use;
There is a scent upon the brier,
A tremulous splendour in the autumn dews,
Cold morns are fringed with fire;

The clodded earth goes up in sweet-breath’d flowers,
In music dies poor human speech,
And into beauty blow those hearts of ours,
When Love is born in each.

Smith was also a charming essayist. See quotations elsewhere.

* * * * *

And so on to the end (and the end draws nearer)
When our souls may be freer, our senses clearer,
(’Tis an old-world creed which is nigh forgot),
When the eyes of the sleepers may waken in wonder,
And hearts may be joined that were riven asunder,
And Time and Love shall be merged—in what?

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

Soft music came to mine ear. It was like the rising breeze, that whirls, at first, the thistle’s beard; then flies, dark-shadowy, over the grass. It was the maid of Füarfed wild: she raised the nightly song; for she knew that my soul was a stream, that flowed at pleasant sounds.

JAMES MACPHERSON (1736-1796).

Macpherson alleged that he had discovered poems by the Gaelic
bard, Ossian, who lived in the Third Century, and he published
translations of them. Actually the poems were his own, but they
were beautiful and had a considerable effect upon literature.

* * * * *

I dare not guess: but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream.

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

SHELLEY (_The Sensitive Plant_).

* * * * *

I should like to make every man, woman, and child discontented with themselves, even as I am discontented with myself. I should like to waken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent, first of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.

CHARLES KINGSLEY (_The Science of Health_, 1872).

The origin of the expression “divine discontent.”

* * * * *

He first deceas’d; she for a little tried
To live without him: liked it not, and died.

SIR HENRY WOTTON (_Reliquiae Wottonianae_,
1685).

* * * * *

Is the yellow bird dead?
Lay your dear little head
Close, close to my heart, and weep, precious one, there,
While your beautiful hair
On my bosom lies light, like a sun-lighted cloud;
No, you need not keep still,
You may sob as you will;
There is some little comfort in crying aloud.

But the days they must come,
When your grief will be dumb;
Grown women like me must take care how they cry.
You will learn by and by
’Tis a womanly art to hide pain out of sight,
To look round with a smile,
Though your heart aches the while
And to keep back your tears till you’ve blown out the light.

MARIAN DOUGLAS (_Picture Poems for Young
Folks_).

* * * * *

My Lord St. Albans said that wise nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high; and, therefore, that exceeding tall men had ever empty heads.

BACON (_Apothegms_).

* * * * *

That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million.
Misses a unit.
That, has the world here—should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find Him.

R. BROWNING (_A Grammarian’s Funeral_).

See _The Inn Album_ (IV) where Browning makes his heroine say:

Better have failed in the high aim, as I,
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed
As, God be thanked, I do not!

* * * * *

There is a secret belief among some men that God is displeased with man’s happiness; and in consequence they slink about creation, ashamed and afraid to enjoy anything.

SIR A. HELPS (_Companions of my Solitude_).

* * * * *

O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _Hic jacet!_

SIR WALTER RALEIGH (_Historie of the World_).

* * * * *

A REQUIEM

Thou hast lived in pain and woe,
Thou hast lived in grief and fear;
Now thine heart can dread no blow,
Now thine eyes can shed no tear:
Storms round us shall beat and rave;
Thou art sheltered in the grave.

Thou for long, long years hast borne,
Bleeding through Life’s wilderness,
Heavy loss and wounding scorn;
Now thine heart is burdenless:
Vainly rest for ours we crave;
Thine is quiet in the grave.

JAMES THOMSON (“B.V.”).

* * * * *

AMPHIBIAN

The fancy I had to-day,
Fancy which turned a fear!
I swam far out in the bay,
Since waves laughed warm and clear.

I lay and looked at the sun,
The noon-sun looked at me:
Between us two, no one
Live creature, that I could see.

Yes! There came floating by
Me, who lay floating too,
Such a strange butterfly!
Creature as dear as new:

Because the membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused, were things
Like soul and nought beside....

What if a certain soul
Which early slipped its sheath,
And has for its home the whole
Of heaven, thus look beneath.

Thus watch one who, in the world,
But lives and likes life’s way,
Nor wishes the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say?

But sometimes when the weather
Is blue, and warm waves tempt
To free oneself of tether,
And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust,
In the sphere which overbrims
With passion and thought,—why, just
Unable to fly, one swims!...

Emancipate through passion
And thought, with sea for sky,
We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven—poetry:

Which sea, to all intent,
Gives flesh such noon-disport
As a finer element
Affords the spirit sort.

Whatever they are, we seem:
Imagine the thing they know;
All deeds they do, we dream;
Can heaven be else but so?

And meantime, yonder streak
Meets the horizon’s verge;
That is the land, to seek
If we tire or dread the surge:

Land the solid and safe—
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress.

Does she look, pity, wonder
At one who mimics flight,
Swims—heaven above, sea under,
Yet always earth in sight?

R. BROWNING (Prologue to _Fifine at the Fair_).

This is not one of Browning’s best poems, but it is
interesting. The butterfly in the air over the poet swimming is
compared to a ‘certain soul,’ Mrs. Browning, looking down upon
him from heaven. The ‘flying,’ free and entirely released from
the earth, is the life of the soul, to which the poet cannot
attain; but during periods of inspiration he lives a life free
of ‘worldly noise and dust,’ which approaches that of the soul.
Such periods of inspiration are likened to ‘swimming’ with the
land always in sight, as compared with the ‘flying’ of the soul
in the far-removed celestial regions. “We substitute, in a
fashion, For heaven—poetry.”

_Whatever they are we seem_: during inspiration the poet’s life
is a reflex of or approach to the heavenly life.

_Amphibian_, because the poet is of earth and yet can “swim”
in the sea of imagination. Charles Lamb speaks of his charming
Child Angel, half-angel, half-human, as Amphibium. Browning’s
poem may have been an unconscious development of a passage from
Sir Thomas Browne’s _Religio Medici_:—“Thus is Man that great
and true _Amphibium_, whose nature is disposed to live, not
only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided
and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense,
there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.”

The sixth and last verses are interesting. Browning, while in
the world “Both lives and likes life’s way,” nor is anxious
that his “wings” should be “unfurled”; and he wonders how his
angel-wife regards him, content with his “mimic flight.”—See p.
114.

* * * * *

We work so hard, we age so soon,
We live so swiftly, one and all,
That ere our day be fairly noon,
The shadows eastward seem to fall.
Some tender light may gild them yet,
As yet, ’tis not so _very_ cold,
And, on the whole, I _won’t_ regret
My slender chance of growing old.

W. J. PROWSE (1836-1870) (_My Lost Old Age_).

Prowse wrote excellent verses before he was 20 and he died at
34.

* * * * *

Calm Soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar,
That there abides a peace of thine
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

MATTHEW ARNOLD (_Lines written in Kensington
Gardens_).

* * * * *

A woman needs to be wooed long after she is won, and the husband who ceases to court his wife is courting disaster.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

TO A GIPSY CHILD BY THE SEASHORE

Who taught this pleading to unpractised eyes?
Who hid such import in an infant’s gloom?
Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?
Who mass’d, round that slight brow, these clouds of doom?...

Glooms that go deep as thine I have not known:
Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.
Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own:
Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.

What mood wears like complexion to thy woe?
His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day,
Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?
—Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray.

Some exile’s, mindful how the past was glad?
Some angel’s, in an alien planet born?
—No exile’s dream was ever half so sad,
Nor any angel’s sorrow so forlorn.

Is the calm thine of stoic souls, who weigh
Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore;
But in disdainful silence turn away,
Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more?

Down the pale cheek long lines of shadow slope,
Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give
—Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope,
Forseen thy harvest, yet proceed’st to live....

Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star,
Match that funereal aspect with her pall,
I think, thou wilt have fathom’d life too far,
Have known too much—or else forgotten all.

The Guide of our dark steps a triple veil
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps;
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.

Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labour’s dull, Lethaean spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soil’d glory, and the trailing wing;

And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may.
In the throng’d fields where winning comes by strife;
And though the just sun gild, as mortals pray,
Some reaches of thy storm-vext stream of life; ...

Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern,
Oh once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain!
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear this majesty of grief again.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

* * * * *

Animula, vagula, blandula.
Hospes, comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, frigida, nudula;
Nec, ut soles, dabis joca!

SPARTIANUS (_Life of Hadrian_).

These lines, put into the mouth of the dying Emperor, have been
translated by Vaughan, Prior, Byron and others. Mr. Clodd (_The
Question—If a Man Die_) gives this version, without naming the
translator:—

Soul of mine, thou fleeting, clinging thing,
Long my body’s mate and guest,
Ah! now whither wilt thou wing,
Pallid, naked, shivering,
Never more to speak and jest.

In all these versions _pallidula_, etc., are applied to
_animula_, but, as Mr. Alfred S. West points out to me, they
appear to be epithets of _loca_ thus:—“Fleeting, winsome soul,
my body’s guest and comrade, that art now about to set out for
regions wan, cold and bare, no more to jest according to thy
wont.”

* * * * *

This wretched Inn, where we scarce stay to bait,
We call our Dwelling-place:
But angels in their full enlightened state,
Angels, who Live, and know what ’tis to Be,
Who all the nonsense of our language see,
Who speak _things_, and our _words_—their ill-drawn pictures—scorn,
When we, by a foolish figure, say,
“Behold an old man dead!” then they
Speak properly, and cry, “Behold a man-child born!”

ABRAHAM COWLEY, 1618-1667 (_Life_).

* * * * *

Here now I am: the house is fast;
I am shut in from all but Thee;
Great witness of my privacy,
Dare I unshamed my soul undress,
And, like a child, seek Thy caress,
Thou Ruler of a realm so vast?

T. T. LYNCH.

* * * * *

The dog walked off to play with a black beetle. The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning; but Doss broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.

OLIVE SCHREINER (_The Story of an African Farm_).

The author is depicting the sadness of life.

* * * * *

GRACE FOR A CHILD

Here a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as Paddocks though they be, frogs
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a benison to fall blessing
On our meat, and on us all. _Amen._

ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674).

* * * * *

As the moon’s soft splendour
O’er the faint cold starlight of Heaven
Is thrown,
So your voice most tender
To the strings without soul had then given
Its own....

Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

SHELLEY (_To Jane_).

* * * * *

While I listen to thy voice,
Chloris! I feel my life decay:
That pow’rful noise
Calls my fleeting soul away.
Oh! suppress that magic sound,
Which destroys without a wound.

Peace, Chloris, peace! or singing die;
That, together, you and I
To heaven may go:
For all we know
Of what the Blessèd do above
Is, that they sing, and that they love.

EDMUND WALLER (1606-1687).

* * * * *

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

O. W. HOLMES.

From letter to Julia Ward Howe in 1889 on her seventieth
birthday. Mrs. Howe wrote the fine “Battle Hymn of the American
Republic,” beginning:—

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored:
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

* * * * *

INSOMNIA

A house of sleepers, I alone unblest
Am still awake and empty vigil keep:
When those who share Life’s day with me find rest,
Oh, let me not be last to fall, asleep.

ANNA REEVE ALDRICH.

She did “fall asleep” at the early age of twenty-six in June,
1892.

* * * * *

The world is full of willing people: some willing to work, and the rest willing to let them.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

“THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY”

What we, when face to face we see
The Father of our souls, shall be,
John tells us, doth not yet appear;
Ah! did he tell what we are here!

A mind for thoughts to pass into,
A heart for loves to travel through,
Five senses to detect things near,
Is this the whole that we are here?

Ah yet, when all is thought and said
The heart still overrules the head;
Still what we hope we must believe,
And what is given us receive;

Must still believe, for still we hope
That in a world of larger scope,
What here is faithfully begun
Will be completed, not undone.

My child, we still must think, when we
That ampler life together see,
Some true result will yet appear
Of what we are, together, here.

A. H. CLOUGH.

* * * * *

Plus je vois les hommes, plus j’admire les chiens.

(The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.)

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation next to that which cometh from heaven. “What, softer than woman?” whispers the young reader. Young reader, woman teases as well as consoles. Woman makes half the sorrows which she boasts the privilege of soothing. On the whole, then, woman in this scale, the weed in that—Jupiter! hang out thy balance and weigh them both; and, if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee, O Jupiter, _try the weed_!

BULWER LYTTON (_What will He do with It?_)

Compare Kipling in “The Betrothed”:—

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

* * * * *

Il y a toujours l’un qui baise, et l’autre qui tend la joue.

(There is always one who kisses and the other who offers the cheek.)

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

Ah, wasteful woman, she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay,
How has she cheapen’d paradise;
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine!