Chapter D: G. ROSSETTI (Stillborn Love) (1)

* * * * *

Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in those far-off days which live in us, and transform our perception into love.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Mill on the Floss_).

The firmaments of daisies since to me
Have had those mornings in their opening eyes;
The bunched cowslip’s pale transparency
Carries that sunshine of sweet memories,
And wild-rose branches take their finest scent
From those blest hours of infantine content.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother and Sister_).

It will be observed that the thought is the same in both
passages.

* * * * *

Get thee behind the man I am now,
You man that I used to be.

R. BROWNING (_Martin Relph_).

* * * * *

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.

R. L. STEVENSON (_Across the Plains_).

* * * * *

I always wanted to make a clean breast of it;
And now it is made—why, my heart’s blood, that went trickle,
Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets,
Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle,
And genially floats me about the giblets.

R. BROWNING (_The Flight of the Duchess_).

* * * * *

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

We have all of us considerable regard for our past self, and are not fond of casting reflections on that respected individual by a total negation of his opinions.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Scenes from Clerical Life_).

* * * * *

SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH

Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main;

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes; comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

A. H. CLOUGH.

* * * * *

The gravest fish is an oyster,
The gravest bird is an owl,
The gravest beast is a donkey,
And the gravest man is a fool.

SCOTCH PROVERB.

* * * * *

... Fear
No petty customs nor appearances;
But think what others only dreamed about;
And say what others did but think; and do
What others did but say; and glory in
What others dared but do.

PHILIP J. BAILEY (_My Lady_).

* * * * *

The Cynic in society becomes the Pessimist in religion. The large embrace of sympathy, which fails him as interpreter of human life, will no less be wanting when he reads the meaning of the universe. The harmony of the great whole escapes him in his hunt for little discords here and there. He is blind to the august balance of nature, in his preoccupation with some creaking show of defect. He misses the comprehensive march of advancing purpose, because while he himself is in it, he has found some halting member that seems to lag behind. He picks holes in the universal order; he winds through its tracks as a detective, and makes scandals of all that is not to his mind; trusts nothing that he cannot see: and he sees chiefly the exceptional, the dubious, the harsh. The glory of the midnight heavens affects him not, for thinking of a shattered planet or the uninhabitable moon. He makes more of the flood which sweeps the crop away, than of the perpetual river that feeds it year by year. For him the purple bloom upon the hills, peering through the young green woods, does but dress up a stony desert with deceitful beauty; and in the new birth of summer, he cannot yield himself to the exuberance of glad existence for wonder why insects tease and nettles sting. Nothing is so fair, nothing so imposing, as to beguile him into faith and hope.... In selfish minds the same temper resorts to the pettiest reasons for the most desolating thoughts: “If God were good, why should I be born with a club-foot? If the world were justly governed how could my merits be so long overlooked?”

J. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, I, 97).

Reverting to this subject later, Martineau says (_Hours of
Thought II._, 354) “Wherever he moves, he empties the space
around him of its purest elements; with his low thought he
roofs it over from the heavenly light and the sweet air; and
then complains of the world as a close-breathed and stifling
place.”

* * * * *

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.

GEORGE MEREDITH (_The Egoist_).

* * * * *

And there’s none of them, but would as soon
Criticize the Almighty as not,
And see that the angels kept tune
And watch that the sun and the moon
Did not squander the light they have got.

W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).

* * * * *

Love, that is first and last of all things made,
The light that has the living world for shade,
The spirit that for temporal veil has on
The souls of all men woven in unison,
One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought
And lights of sunny and starry deed and thought ...
Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime;
Love, that is blood within the veins of time....
Love, that sounds loud or light in all men’s ears,
Whence all men’s eyes take fire from sparks of tears,
That binds on all men’s feet or chains or wings;
Love, that is root and fruit of terrene things;
Love, that the whole world’s waters shall not drown,
The whole world’s fiery forces not burn down;
Love, that what time his own hands guard his head
The whole world’s wrath and strength shall not strike dead;
Love, that if once his own hands make his grave
The whole world’s pity and sorrow shall not save ...
Love that is fire within thee and light above,
And lives by grace of nothing but of love.

SWINBURNE (_Tristram of Lyonesse_).

* * * * *

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting, its roses.

E. A. POE (_For Annie_).

* * * * *

Now, for myself, when once the wick is crushed,
I ask not where the light is, which is not,
Nor where the music, when the harp is hushed,
Nor where the memory, which is clean forgot.

W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).

* * * * *

Goethe says somewhere there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would hate him. I would prefer to say that there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would _love_ him.

R. HODGSON (_Letter_).

* * * * *

For us no shadow on life’s solemn dial
Goes back to give us peace;
There is no resting-place in the stern trial
Until the heart-throbs cease;
We cannot hold Time fast, and bid him bless us,
And not for us the sun,
When shades fall fast, and doubts and woes oppress us,
Stands still in Gibeon.

E. H. SEARS.

* * * * *

Here’s my case. Of old I used to love him
This same unseen friend, before I knew:
Dream there was none like him, none above him,—
Wake to hope and trust my dream was true....

All my days, I’ll go the softlier, sadlier,
For that dream’s sake! How forget the thrill
Through and through me as I thought “The gladlier
Lives my friend because I love him still!”

R. BROWNING (_Fears and Scruples_).

The “Friend” is God. The lines “All my days, I’ll go the
softlier, sadlier, For that dream’s sake,” seem to me very
beautiful. In so few words Browning, with dramatic insight,
expresses the feeling of a Renan or George Eliot after they had
lost their faith in Christianity.

* * * * *

The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow....

In proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the colour of their present thought to all nature and all art.... The great man makes the great thing.... Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

EMERSON (_The American Scholar_).

* * * * *

Cantat Deo, qui vivit Deo.

(He sings to God, who lives to God.)

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

Jenny Lind used to say, “I sing to God.”

* * * * *

A CONSERVATIVE

The garden beds I wandered by
One bright and cheerful morn,
When I found a new-fledged butterfly,
A-sitting on a thorn,
A black and crimson butterfly,
All doleful and forlorn.

I thought that life could have no sting
To infant butterflies,
So I gazed on this unhappy thing
With wonder and surprise,
While sadly with his waving wing
He wiped his weeping eyes.

Said I, “What can the matter be?
Why weepest thou so sore,
With garden fair and sunlight free
And flowers in goodly store?”—
But he only turned away from me
And burst into a roar.

Cried he, “My legs are thin and few
Where once I had a swarm!
Soft fuzzy fur—a joy to view—
Once kept my body warm,
Before these flapping wing-things grew,
To hamper and deform!”

At that outrageous bug I shot
The fury of mine eye;
Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
“You ignominious idiot!
Those wings are made to fly!”

“I do not want to fly,” said he,
“I only want to squirm!”
And he dropped his wings dejectedly,
But still his voice was firm:
“I do not want to be a fly!
I want to be a worm!”

O yesterday of unknown lack!
To-day of unknown bliss!
I left my fool in red and black,
The last I saw was this,—
The creature madly climbing back
Into his chrysalis.

CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON.

* * * * *

The very fiends weave ropes of sand
Rather than taste pure hell in idleness.

R. BROWNING (_A Forgiveness_).

* * * * *

He had formed several ingenious plans by which he meant to circumvent people of large fortune and small capacity; but then he never met with exactly the right people under exactly the right circumstances.... It is possible to pass a great many bad half-pennies and bad half-crowns, but I believe there has no instance been known of passing a half-penny or a half-crown for a sovereign.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother Jacob_).

* * * * *

In the old times Death was a feverish sleep,
In which men walked. The other world was cold
And thinly-peopled, so life’s emigrants
Came back to mingle with the crowds of earth:
But now great cities are transplanted thither,
Memphis, and Babylon, and either Thebes,
And Priam’s towery town with its one beech.
The dead are most and merriest: so be sure
There will be no more haunting, till their towns
Are full to the garret; then they’ll shut their gates,
To keep the living out, and perhaps leave
A dead or two between both kingdoms.

T. L. BEDDOES (_Death’s Jest-Book_, III, 3).

This is one of the queer fancies in a curious poem.

* * * * *

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.

EMERSON (_Essay on Experience_).

* * * * *

De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus.

(We make for ourselves a ladder of our vices, when we tread under foot the vices themselves.)

ST. AUGUSTINE (_De Ascensione_).

* * * * *

I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

TENNYSON (_In Memoriam_).

* * * * *

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!

LONGFELLOW (_The Ladder of St. Augustine_).

* * * * *

The trials that beset you,
The sorrows ye endure,
The manifold temptations
That death alone can cure,

What are they but His jewels
Of right celestial worth?
What are they but the ladder
Set up to Heav’n on earth?

J. M. NEALE (_O Happy Band of Pilgrims_).

* * * * *

I can bear it no longer—this diabolical invention of gentility, which kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed! Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie, and should be flung into the fire. Organize rank and precedence! That was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward, some great marshal, and organize Equality in society.

THACKERAY (_Book of Snobs_).

* * * * *

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the devil’s booth are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking:
’Tis heaven alone that is given away,
’Tis only God may be had for the asking.

J. R. LOWELL (_The Vision of Sir Launfal_).

* * * * *

... The too susceptible Tupman, who, to the wisdom and experience of maturer years, superadded the enthusiasm and ardour of a boy, in the most interesting and pardonable of human weaknesses, love. Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it disappeared from within the range of Tupman’s vision; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon the borders of the white cravat; but the soul of Tupman had known no change.

CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).

* * * * *

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the _savants_ in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every man’s road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings. Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference; and marriage a parricide.

ALEXANDER SMITH (_The Importance of a Man to Himself_).

* * * * *

I think sometimes how good it were had I some one by me to listen when I am tempted to read a passage aloud. Yes, but is there any mortal in the whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for sympathetic understanding—nay, who would even generally be at one with me in my appreciation? Such harmony of intelligences is the rarest thing. All through life we long for it ... and, after all, we learn that the vision is illusory. To every man is it decreed: Thou shalt live alone.

GEORGE GISSING (_The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_).

* * * * *

ISOLATION

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live _alone_.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour—

Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who ordered, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

This fine poem is one of a series called “Switzerland,” which
was written as the result of Arnold’s meeting and falling in
love with a lady at Berne. The poem immediately preceding it in
the series is entitled “Isolation: To Marguerite,” while this
is called “To Marguerite, Continued” but as it is now quoted
separately, it is better entitled “Isolation.”

In the preceding poems the lady has lost her affection while
her lover is still devoted; and this leads to the subject of
our isolation from each other in our inner lives. In the second
verse the poet describes the moments when we most crave for
love, sympathy, and mutual spiritual understanding and union.

For an interesting fact connected with this poem, see next
quotation and note.

* * * * *

(Thackeray has been describing how husband, wife, mother, son—each of the inmates of a household—is interested in his or her own separate world and looking at the same things from a different point of view.) How lonely we are in the world! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united: pshaw! does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache?... As for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, Do you tell _her_ all? Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.

THACKERAY (_Pendennis_, ch. XVI).

The similarity between this passage and the preceding poem,
written at about the same time, is very curious. Arnold’s
poem appeared in 1852 but was composed ten years earlier,
while _Pendennis_ was published in monthly parts in 1849-50.
Therefore, neither author would consciously know at the time
what the other had written.

The incident is probably an illustration of the mysterious way
in which minds influence one another and create the spirit of
the particular age. There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb to
the effect that we are more the product of our age than of our
parents. This permeating quality of thought and feeling is,
no doubt, the explanation why the highest art and literature,
though often unappreciated at the time, become ultimately
recognized. It appears not to be sufficiently taken into
account in other directions. For instance, it is repeatedly
stated that Blake, because of the limited circulation of his
poems, exercised _no_ influence on the Romantic Revival—see for
example _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. XI,
201. Yet we know that his work was known to and appreciated by
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Hayley. (Although
little regarded now, Hayley’s fame was then so great that he
was offered and refused the poet-laureateship. He appears to
be the one man who was an intimate friend of both Blake and
Cowper.) While a very long period went by before Blake’s poems
became generally known, their influence may well have been
very great, permeating unconsciously through other minds. See
reference on p. 194 to the similar case of Fitzgerald’s “Omar
Khayyam.”

Even if a poem were read by _only one person_, it might
conceivably influence a generation of authors. Suppose, if that
had been possible, a page of Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse”
or F. W. H. Myers’ “Implicit Promise” (both quoted elsewhere)
had been read by Pope or Dryden; how the monotonous heroic
couplet of their time might have been transformed!

* * * * *

A child was playing on a summer strand
That fringed the wavelets of a sunny sea;
The mother looked in love. “Now build,” said she,
“Your splendid golden castles where you stand;
But when the wave has beaten all to sand,
You must go home.” “Ah, not so soon,” said he.

And now the night has darkened out his glee,
And sad-eyed Grief has grasped him by the hand.
No more the years shall find him free and wild
And madly merry as a bright brave bird:
For earth has nothing like the home he craves
And pauseless Time is beating bitter waves
On all his palaces. He waits the word
Away beyond the blue, “Come home, my child.”

R. HODGSON, 1879.

An impromptu written when the mother and child incident
happened and not revised.

* * * * *

Humanity is neither a love for the whole human race, nor a love for each individual of it, but a love for the race, or for the ideal of man, in each individual. In other and less pedantic words, he who is truly humane considers every human being _as such_ interesting and important, and without waiting to criticize each individual specimen, pays in advance to all alike the tribute of good wishes and sympathy.... If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by preference with these meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ bore to it.

SIR J. R. SEELEY (_Ecce Homo_).

* * * * *

On parent knees, a naked, new-born child,
Weeping thou sat’st while all around thee smiled:
So live, that sinking to thy life’s last sleep
Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep.

SIR WILLIAM JONES (1746-1794) (_From the
Persian_).

* * * * *

Can the earth where the harrow is driven
The sheaf of the furrow foresee?
Or thou guess the harvest for heaven
When iron has entered in thee?

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

This was quoted by Lord Lytton in an essay on _The Influence of
Love upon Literature and Real Life_.

* * * * *

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver, Omar, plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

J. R. LOWELL (_On Omar Khayyam_).

* * * * *

It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Daniel Deronda_).

* * * * *

So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.

G. MACDONALD (_Phantastes_).

In the story an ogre is reading this passage from a book.
_Phantastes_ is MacDonald’s finest work.

* * * * *

There, on the fields around,
All men shall till the ground,
Corn shall wave yellow, and bright rivers stream;
Daily, at set of sun,
All, when their work is done,
Shall watch the heavens yearn down and the strange starlight gleam.

R. BUCHANAN (_The City of Man_).

This is the poet’s vision of the city of the future, and will
be interesting to the allotment-holders in English cities
to-day.

* * * * *

Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

R. BROWNING (_A Toccata of Galuppi’s_).

* * * * *

Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime,
Il faut aimer ce que l’on a.

(When you have not what you love
You must love what you have.)

THOMAS CORNEILLE (_L’Inconnu_).

* * * * *

At last methought that I had wandered far
In an old wood: fresh-washed in coolest dew
The maiden splendours of the morning star
Shook in the steadfast blue....

At length I saw a lady within call,
Stiller than chiselled marble, standing there;
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair.

...

I turning saw, throned on a flowery rise,
One sitting on a crimson scarf unrolled;
A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes,
Brow-bound with burning gold....

“I died a Queen. The Roman soldier found
Me lying dead, my crown about my brows,
A name for ever!—lying robed and crowned,
Worthy a Roman spouse.”

TENNYSON (_A Dream of Fair Women_).

Helen of Troy and Cleopatra—but, as Peacock mentioned in _Gryll
Grange_, Cleopatra was of pure Greek descent and could not have
been a “swarthy” lady.

* * * * *

One pond of water gleams;
... the trees bend
O’er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl.

R. BROWNING (_Pauline_).

* * * * *

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.

KEATS (_La Belle Dame sans Merci_).

* * * * *

He put the hawthorn twigs apart,
And yet saw no more wondrous thing
Than seven white swans, who on wide wing
Went circling round, till one by one
They dropped the dewy grass upon.

W. MORRIS (_The Earthly Paradise, the Land
East of the Sun_).

* * * * *

Quoth Christabel.—So let it be!
And, as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Christabel_)

The six quotations above are word-pictures (see note p. 85).

* * * * *

It is a mistake into which spiritually-minded men have fallen, that God is apprehended and known by a special faculty. The fact is that every faculty is serviceable in this noble work. We reach the Divine through our aesthetic faculties when our soul is stirred by a grand burst of music, or by the contemplation of a magnificent landscape. We reach the Divine through our purely intellectual faculties, when, by true reasoning, founded on sound observation, we master any great law by which God governs the world. We reach the Divine through our emotional nature when pure grief or pure love, holy longing, unselfish hope, righteous indignation, elevate us above the prosaic level of customary equanimity, and help us to realize the incomparable beauty of holiness.

Just as the weeping Magdalene[32] stood bewailing the loss of what even to her was only sacred clay, all unconscious that her Saviour had been given back to her without seeing corruption, in a glorified and eternal form, not dead, but alive for evermore, whom she could love with ever increasing ardour of devotion: so, we say, there are not a few in our time whose lot it is to wring their hands over the grave of lost ideas, which they loved and their fathers loved, but for which God himself is substituting ideas nobler and better far, which earlier ages failed to grasp only because they were not in circumstances to feel their higher worth.

One cannot demonstrate on any physical or visible basis whatever, that it is a nobler thing to suffer injustice than to commit it, that truth-speaking is honourable, forgiveness of injuries magnanimous, and loving self-sacrifice for others sublime. Honour, purity, humility, reverence, tenderness, courtesy, patience, these things cannot be weighed on physical scales, cannot be handled or touched, or melted or frozen in any mechanical or chemical laboratory. They belong to a different order of realities from acids and vapours: they are denizens of what, for want of any more definite or accurate expression, we are accustomed to call the spiritual world.

One can see how religion should, to a young person, be associated with repressive and prohibitive laws. Youth is the time for the luxuriating of newborn, and, therefore, delicious vital forces. But its very luxuriance is disorderly, and religion cannot coexist with disorder. Therefore, that which is so continually warning the young against impulse, and passion, and irregularity, ought not to be too greatly displeased if it should, by and by, come to be regarded by the young as a synonym for mere repressive force, and, therefore, as an unpleasant and unpopular thing. I believe, too, that there is no exception to the uniformity of the experience, that all young countries adopt freer systems of religion, and divest religious bodies more completely of all political and properly coercive power than older countries. It is all an illustration of the same thing. Young life, which most needs regulation, most dislikes it.[33]

As the genius of the bard is in the poem, as the wisdom of the legislator is in the law, as the skill of the mechanician is in the engine, as the soul of the musician is in the harmony and melody, as the words of a man’s lips issue from the inner world of his mental and spiritual character—so every work of God, and conspicuously man, as the noblest of God’s works, may truly be said to shadow forth a portion of the mind of God.

We talk of creation as a past thing. But the truth is, creation is eternal. Creation never ceases. Every time the clouds drop in rain, every time the waters freeze into new ice, every time the juices of nature gather into another violet, every time a new wail of life is heard upon a mother’s breast, every time you breathe another sigh, or shed another tear, there is God as truly present in His miraculous creative capacity as on the day when He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

P. S. MENZIES (_Sermons_).

Apart from their intrinsic value, the above extracts are
given because this book of sermons is of special interest to
Australians and because it has passed into oblivion. There are
very few copies in existence.

Menzies came from Glasgow to Scots Church, Melbourne, in 1868
and died at the early age of thirty-four in 1874. At the
Glasgow University he had been largely influenced mentally and
spiritually by Principal Caird.

The sermons published in this book were selected by his widow
after his death. Although not revised by their gifted young
author, the fine thoughts expressed in chaste and beautiful
language remind one of James Martineau.

* * * * *

Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions—like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.

GEORGE ELIOT (_The Lifted Veil_).

* * * * *

My _Galligaskins_ that have long withstood
The Winter’s Fury, and incroaching Frosts,
By Time subdued, (what will not Time subdue!)
An horrid Chasm disclose, with Orifice
Wide, discontinuous.

JOHN PHILLIPS (1676-1709) (_The Splendid
Shilling_).

_Galligaskins_, trunk-hose. “The Splendid Shilling” is a famous
parody on Milton.

* * * * *

We would not pray that sorrow ne’er may shed
Her dews along the pathway they must tread;
The sweetest flowers would never bloom at all,
If no least rain of tears did ever fall.

GERALD MASSEY (_Via Crucis, Via Lucis_).

* * * * *

But his wings will not rest and his feet will not stay for us;
Morning is here in the joy of its might;
With his breath has he sweetened a night and a day for us;
Now let him pass and the myrtles make way for us;
Love can but last in us here at his height
For a day and a night.

SWINBURNE (_At Parting_).

* * * * *

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).

In the story Dorothea has found her husband to be a man of
narrow mind and unsympathetic nature. Such a disillusionment
after marriage frequently happens, and we are not deeply
moved by what is not unusual, although it may mean a real
life-tragedy. Ruskin says “God gives the disposition to every
healthy human mind in some degree to pass over or even harden
itself against evil things, else the suffering would be too
great to be borne” (_Modern Painters_ v., xix., 32). Only thus
could we have lived through the horrors of the present war.

George Eliot’s analogy between intensity of the emotions and
acuteness of the senses reminds one of Pope’s lines (“Essay on
Man,” Ep. I.) where he says life would be insupportable, if we
had the acute hearing, smell and other senses of insects and
other animals; we should

Die of a rose in aromatic pain.

* * * * *

Man that passes by
So like to God, so like the beasts that die.

W. MORRIS (_The Earthly Paradise_).

* * * * *

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not in semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power,
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and bye.

R. BROWNING (_Abt Vogler_).

Abt—or Abbé—Georg Joseph Vogler, 1749-1814, a German organist
and composer, is probably chosen by Browning because, although
an important musician, his compositions have perished. In this
fine poem Vogler has been extemporizing, and his inspired music
has lifted him in ecstasy to heaven. The sounds are his slaves
who have built palaces of music, as in the Arab legends angels
and demons built magic structures for Solomon. He grieves that
this wonderful music should apparently have vanished for ever;
but is comforted by the thought that no good thing, no fine
aspiration, no great effort or noble impulse can really die,
but must exist for ever in the mind of God.

If Browning had known the evidence now afforded scientifically
by hypnotism and otherwise, he might have come to the
conclusion that all our thoughts and feelings, _both good
and bad_, are recorded deep down in our own consciousness.
Moreover, the existence of thought-transference leads to the
somewhat dreadful suggestion that this record of all our
inmost thoughts and feelings may possibly become open to the
inspection of every one.

The quotation reminds one of Wordsworth’s sonnet on the “Inside
of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.”

Where music dwells
Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.

* * * * *

... Had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth;
Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:—

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

ROBERT BROWNING (_Abt Vogler_).

See the preceding note. The poet says that Painting and Poetry
are “art in obedience to laws,” but the musician exerts a
higher _creative_ will akin to that of God. The painter has
before him the pictures he reproduces, the poet borrows
his imagery from visible things and has apt words in which
to express his thoughts: the musician has nothing visible,
nothing outside his own soul, to assist him, and can use only
the meaningless sounds which we hear everywhere around us. By
combining, however, three of those empty sounds (in a chord)
he evolves a fourth sound, which so transcends all that other
arts can do in expressing emotion that Browning compares it to
a “star.”

But this expresses only part of the poet’s meaning. In using
this tremendous comparison to a _star_, as also in enthroning
music supreme above art and poetry, he means that it transcends
their loftiest flights and rises _above our world_ to the
heavens above. In the earlier part of the poem the “pinnacled
glory” built by the slaves of sound at the bidding of the
musician’s soul is based “broad on the roots of things” and
ascends until it “attains to heaven.”

F. W. H. Myers, in “The Renewal of Youth,” has a passage on
music. His theme is that while music (as in Mozart’s operas)
may express human passion, it also (as in Beethoven) rises
to greater heights and appears to voice the emotions of a
world beyond our senses. In the lines I have italicized in
the following passage he no doubt refers to Browning’s line,
“That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a
star!”—the “star” meaning that music ascends to a higher world
than our own:—

... Music is a creature bound,
A voice not ours, the imprisoned soul of sound,—
Who fain would bend down hither and find her part
In the strong passion of a hero’s heart,
Or one great hour constrains herself to sing
Pastoral peace and waters wandering;—
_Then hark how on a chord she is rapt and flown_
_To that true world thou seest not nor hast known_,
Nor speech of thine can her strange thought unfold,
The bars’ wild beat, and ripple of running gold.

Not only does Browning unselfishly assert that the sister-art
is superior to his own, but he goes further, and doubts if
music is not the greatest of all man’s gifts. I do not discuss
either contention—leaving musicians to rejoice in the tribute
of a great poet.

* * * * *

Although a gem be cast away,
And lie obscured in heaps of clay,
Its precious worth is still the same;
Although vile dust be whirled to heaven,
To it no dignity is given,
Still base as when from earth it came.

SADI (_L. S. Costello’s translation_).

* * * * *

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done....
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

TENNYSON (_Ulysses_).

* * * * *

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad.
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kissed me.

LEIGH HUNT.

“Jenny” was Mrs. Carlyle.

* * * * *

A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides
And o’er the heart of man: invisibly
It comes, to works of unreproved delight
And tendency benign, directing those
Who care not, know not, think not what they do.
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby; romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours,
And _they must_ have their food. Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements.

WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude_, Bk. V.)

* * * * *

The world is so inconveniently constituted, that the vague consciousness of being a fine fellow is no guarantee of success in any line of business.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother Jacob_).

* * * * *

Wasted, weary,—wherefore stay
Wrestling thus with earth and clay!
From the body pass away!—
Hark! the mass is singing.

From thee doff thy mortal weed,
Mary Mother be thy speed,
Saints to help thee at thy need!
Hark! the knell is ringing.

Fear not snow-drift driving past,
Sleet, or hail, or levin blast;
Soon the shroud shall lap thee fast,
And the sleep be on thee cast
That shall know no waking.

Haste thee, haste thee to be gone,
Earth flits past, and time draws on,—
Gasp thy gasp, and groan thy groan,
Day is near the breaking.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

From _Guy Mannering_. Scott says it is a prayer or spell, which
was used in Scotland or Northern England to speed the passage
of a parting spirit, like the tolling of a bell in Catholic
days.

* * * * *

The world is full of Woodmen who expel
Love’s gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell.

SHELLEY (_The Woodman and the Nightingale_).

* * * * *

Evil of every kind, being familiar to us as an _object_ of apprehension, appears to be external to ourselves. And yet it is invested with the greater part of its severity by the mind: it acts upon us by the ideas it awakens, the affections it wounds, the aspirations it disappoints. If its outward pressure were all, and it dealt with us as beings of sense alone, it would lose most of its poignancy and would dwindle down into a few animal pangs.... It is our higher nature that creates immeasurably the greater part of the ills we endure: they are ideal, not sensible: and it is the privilege of reason to have tears instead of groans; of love to know grief instead of pain; of conscience to replace uneasiness with remorse.... Penury, disgrace, bereavement, guilt, are evils which we must be human in order to feel; and it is the penalty of our nobleness, not only to be weighed down by their occasional burthen, but to be perpetually haunted by the phantom of their approach.

JAMES MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, II, 150).

* * * * *

Two or three of them got round me, and begged me for the twentieth time to tell them the name of my country. Then, as they could not pronounce it satisfactorily, they insisted that I was deceiving them, and that it was a name of my own invention. One funny old man, who bore a ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home, was almost indignant. “Unglung!” said he, “who ever heard of such a name?—anglang, angerlang—_that_ can’t be the name of your country; you are playing with us.” Then he tried to give a convincing illustration. “My country is Wanumbai—anybody can say Wanumbai. I’m an orang-Wanumbai; but N-glung! who ever heard of such a name? Do tell us the real name of your country, and when you are gone we shall know how to talk about you.” To this luminous argument and remonstrance I could oppose nothing but assertion, and the whole party remained firmly convinced that I was for some reason or other deceiving them.

A. R. WALLACE (_The Malay Archipelago_).

* * * * *

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

LONGFELLOW (_Tales of a Wayside Inn_).

This was written in 1863, but ten years earlier Alexander
Smith, in “A Life Drama,” had written:

We twain have met like the ships upon the sea,
Who hold an hour’s converse, so short, so sweet;
One little hour! and then away they speed
On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam,
To meet no more.

Other writers have also used the same simile. See next poem.

* * * * *

QUA CURSUM VENTUS

As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;

When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:

E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?

At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered—
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!

To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.

But O blithe breeze! and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.

One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,—
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!
At last, at last, unite them there!

A. H. CLOUGH.

Two friends, who through absence have become “soul from soul
estranged,” are compared to two ships, which unconsciously draw
apart during the night and must continue a diverging course;
but, being both bound for the same port, will at the end of
their life-voyage be re-united.

* * * * *

Speak to Him thou, for He hears—and Spirit with Spirit can meet—
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

TENNYSON (_The Higher Pantheism_).

Tennyson, here and elsewhere (see, for example, the king’s
beautiful speech in “The Passing of Arthur”) urges us to
_prayer_, and adds his belief in a personal intercourse with
an ever-present and loving God. Innumerable men of the highest
character during nineteen centuries have testified to the same
direct communion with the Almighty.

* * * * *

A third in sugar with unscriptural hand
Traffics and builds a lasting house on sand.

ALFRED AUSTIN (_The Golden Age_).

* * * * *

Thou canst not in life’s city
Rule thy course as in a cell:
There are others, all thy brothers,
Who have work to do as well.

Some events that mar thy purpose
May light _them_ upon their way;
Our sun-shining in declining
Gives earth’s other side the day.

R. A. VAUGHAN (_Hours with the Mystics_).

* * * * *

My little craft sails not alone;
A thousand fleets from every zone
Are out upon a thousand seas;
And what for me were favouring breeze
Might dash another, with the shock
Of doom, upon some hidden rock.
And so I do not dare to pray
For winds to waft me on my way.

CATHERINE ATHERTON MASON.

* * * * *

A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin and a jerkin’s lining: rumple the one, you rumple the other.

STERNE (_Tristram Shandy_).

* * * * *

Il (Boucher) trouvait la nature trop verte et mal éclairée. Et son ami, Lancret, le peintre des salons à la mode, lui répondait: “Je suis de votre sentiment, la nature manque d’harmonie et de séduction.”

(He, Boucher, found nature too green and badly lit. And his friend, Lancret, the fashionable painter of the day, replied to him, “I am of your opinion, nature is wanting in harmony and seductiveness.”)

CHARLES BLANC.

See following quotation.

* * * * *