Chapter D: G. ROSSETTI (Stillborn Love) (3)

Is a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of the Apple.... He is nature’s fresh picture, newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper, unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater.... His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loth to use so deceitful an organ.... We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest: and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems and mocking of man’s business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has outlived. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.... Could he put off his body with his little Coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.

JOHN EARLE (_Micro-Cosmographie_, 1628).

* * * * *

As when a Gryphon through the wilderness
With wingèd course, o’er hill and moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold.

MILTON (_Paradise Lost_).

The Griffin, with head and wings of a bird and body of a
lion, is pursuing, “half on foot, half flying,” the one-eyed
Arimaspian, who is fleeing on horseback with the purloined
gold. The Griffins guarded mines of gold and hidden treasure.
(_Herodotus_, iv, 27.)

* * * * *

A WOMAN’S THOUGHT

I am a woman—therefore I may not
Call to him, cry to him,
Fly to him,
Bid him delay not!

Then when he comes to me, I must sit quiet;
Still as a stone—
All silent and cold.
If my heart riot—
Crush and defy it!
Should I grow bold,
Say one dear thing to him,
All my life fling to him,
Cling to him—
What to atone
Is enough for my sinning?
This were the cost to me,
This were my winning—
That he were lost to me.
Not as a lover
At last if he part from me,
Tearing my heart from me,
Hurt beyond cure—
Calm and demure
Then must I hold me,
In myself fold me,
Lest he discover;
Showing no sign to him
By look of mine to him
What he has been to me—
How my heart turns to him,
Follows him, yearns to him,
Prays him to love me.

Pity me, lean to me,
Thou God above me!

RICHARD WATSON GILDER (1844-1909).

* * * * *

Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.

MACAULAY (_On Niccolo Machiavelli_).

A wonderful record, if it were correct, but “Old Nick” is said
to be derived from Scandinavian mythology.

* * * * *

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.

MONTAIGNE (Essay, _Of Repentance_).

* * * * *

Coleridge was holding forth on the effects produced by his preaching, and appealed to Lamb: “You have heard me preach, I think?” “I have never heard you do anything else,” was the urbane reply.

(John Sterling said) Coleridge is best described in his own words:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread.
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.[47]

Madame de Staël was by no means pleased with her intercourse with him, saying spitefully and feelingly, “M. Coleridge a un grand talent pour le monologue” (“Mr. Coleridge has a great talent for monologue”).

CAROLINE FOX’S JOURNALS.

Here we have different views of Coleridge’s monologues. Mme. de
Staël objected to his monopolizing the conversation, but his
friends loved to hear him. Lamb, of course, had to have his
joke.

* * * * *

Where is the use of the lip’s red charm,
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,
And the blood that blues the inside arm—
Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,
The earthly gift to an end divine?
A lady of clay is as good, I trow.

R. BROWNING.

* * * * *

What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.

FRANCIS BEAUMONT (_Epistle to Ben Jonson_).

What would one not give to have been present at the Mermaid
Tavern with the wonderful Elizabethans who met there? Among
them were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Carew, and John Selden. One is
reminded of the _Symposium_ of Plato.

The poem of Keats is well known:

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

* * * * *

On a day like this, when the sun is hid,
And you and your heart are housed together,
If memories come to you all unbid,
And something suddenly wets your lid,
Like a gust of the out-door weather,
Why, who is in fault but the dim old day,
Too dark for labour, too dull for play?

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries with him the germ of his most exceptional actions; and, if we wise people make fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

GEORGE ELIOT.

* * * * *

I understand those women who say they don’t want the ballot. They purpose to hold the real power, while we go through the mockery of making laws. They want the power without the responsibility.

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (_My Summer in a Garden_).

* * * * *

If we cannot find God in your house or in mine; upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern Him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, _there_ is miracle; and it is simply undevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which He does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.

JAMES MARTINEAU (_Endeavours after the Christian Life_).

* * * * *

Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

* * * * *

My burden bows me to the knee;
O Lord, ’tis more than I can bear.
Didst Thou not come our load to share?
My burden bows me to the knee:
Dear Jesus, let me lean on Thee!...

Far off, so far, the Heavens be,
With their wide arms! and I would prove
The close, warm-beating heart of Love.
But so far-off the Heavens be:
Dear Jesus, let me lean on Thee!

GERALD MASSEY (_Out of the Depths_).

This poem is omitted from _My Lyrical Life_, Massey’s collected
poems.

* * * * *

Night dreams of day, and winter seems
In sleep to breathe the balm of May,
Their dreams are true anon; but they,
The dreamers, then, alas, are dreams.

Thus, while our days the dreams renew
Of some forgotten sleeper, we,
The dreamers of futurity,
Shall vanish when our own are true.

J. B. TABB.

* * * * *

THE MOTHER WHO DIED TOO

She was so little—little in her grave,
The wide earth all around so hard and cold—
She was so little! therefore did I crave
My arms might still her tender form enfold.
She was so little, and her cry so weak
When she among the heavenly children came—
She was so little—I alone might speak
For her who knew no word nor her own name.

EDITH MATILDA THOMAS.

* * * * *

The economy of Heaven is dark;
And wisest clerks have miss’d the mark,
Why human buds, like this, should fall,
More brief than fly ephemeral
That has his day; while shrivell’d crones
Stiffen with age to stocks and stones;
And crabbed use the conscience sears
In sinners of an hundred years.

CHARLES LAMB (_On an infant dying as soon as
born_).

* * * * *

Oh dreadful thought, if all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be,—
Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon
A write delight, a Parian Parthenon,
And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid
Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade.

And in processions’ pomp together bent
Still interchange their sweet words innocent,—
Not caring that those mighty columns rest
Each on the ruin of a human breast,—
That to the shrine the victor’s chariot rolls
Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!

“Well was it that our fathers suffered thus,”
I hear them say, “that all might end in us;
Well was it here and there a bard should feel
Pains premature and hurt that none could heal;
These were their preludes, thus the race began;
So hard a matter was the birth of Man.”

And yet these too shall pass and fade and flee,
And in their death shall be as vile as we,
Nor much shall profit with their perfect powers
To have lived a so much sweeter life than ours,
When at the last, with all their bliss gone by,
Like us those glorious creatures come to die,
With far worse woe, far more rebellious strife
Those mighty spirits drink the dregs of life.

F. W. H. MYERS (_The Implicit Promise of
Immortality_).

It will be observed that Myers, like Swinburne, handled the
old heroic couplet in a masterly manner, undreamt of by Pope,
Dryden, and their generation.

* * * * *

God’s works—paint any one, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works
Are here already; nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her (which you can’t)
There’s no advantage! You must beat her then.”
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, _painted_—better to us
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

R. BROWNING (_Fra Lippo Lippi_).

* * * * *

For the folk through the fretful hours are hurled
On the ruthless rush of the wondrous world,
And none has leisure to lie and cull
The blossoms, that made life beautiful
In that old season when men could sing
For dear delight in the risen Spring
And Summer ripening fruit and flower.
Now carefulness cankers every hour;
We are too weary and sad to sing;
Our pastime’s poisoned with thought-taking.

JOHN PAYNE (_Tournesol_).

* * * * *

I am much engaged, an old man and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully,—nor indeed can they be answered. Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any Revelation. As for a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. Wishing you happiness, I remain, &c.

CHARLES DARWIN (_Letter to von Müller, June 5, 1879_).

This letter is reproduced in the _Life and Letters_, but
evidently Francis Darwin did not know that the “German youth”
to whom he says it was written was Baron Ferdinand von Müller,
K.C.M.G. (1825-1896), then fifty-three years of age! Von Müller
was director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens from 1857 to
1873, and died in Melbourne in 1896. He did important work in
Australian botany.

As regards Darwin’s letter, it seems to me that a sufficient
reason why a great and lovable man, who was at first a
convinced believer in the immortality of the soul, became an
agnostic is given in the next quotation. The higher aesthetic
part of his brain had become atrophied.

Darwin himself thought that he had not given sufficient
consideration to religious questions and was exceedingly
anxious that his own agnostic views should not influence others,

* * * * *

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that (aesthetic) part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

CHARLES DARWIN.

This is from autobiographical notes made by Darwin for his
children, and not intended for publication.

* * * * *

God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!

R. BROWNING (_One Word More_).

* * * * *

CHILDREN’S HYMN ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.

At length has come the twilight dim.
The sun has set, the day has died;
And now we sing Thy holy hymn,
O Mary maid, at eventide.

To Jewry, to that far-off land,
Erstwhile there came a little Child;
You led Him softly by the hand,
He was so very small and mild.

Like us, He could not find his way,
Although He was Our Lord, the King;
And so we beg we may not stray,
Nor do a sad or foolish thing.

Teach us the prayer that Jesus said,
The words you sang and murmured low,
When He was in His tiny bed,
And all the earth was dark and slow.

Hushed are the trees, and the small wise bees,
Our fathers are on the deep,—
Little Mother, be good to us, please!
It is time to go asleep.

VINCENT O’SULLIVAN.

* * * * *

WESLEY’S MEDICAL PRESCRIPTIONS

For an Ague:—Make six middling pills of cobwebs. Take one a little before the cold fit; two a little before the next fit (suppose the next day); the other three, if need be, a little before the third fit. This seldom fails.

A Cut:—Bind on toasted cheese. This will cure a deep cut.

A Fistula:—Grind an ounce of sublimate mercury as fine as possible.... (Two quarts of water to be added, then half a spoonful with two spoonfuls of water to be taken fasting every other day), ... In forty days this will also cure any cancer, any old sore or King’s evil.

_The Iliac Passion_:—Hold a live puppy constantly on the belly.

JOHN WESLEY (_Primitive Physic._ Ed. 1780).

The iliac passion, now known as _ileus_, is a severe colic due
to intestinal obstruction.

It seems strange that so eminent a man should have believed
in these absurd prescriptions, but as a matter of fact the
book generally is much more sane and sound than one would
expect from the habits and state of knowledge of the time. For
example, in his rules of health Wesley strongly advises the
practice of _cold bathing_, cleanliness, open-air exercise,
moderation of food, etc. Also these prescriptions are chosen
for their absurdity—in each case other more sensible remedies
are offered. But Wesley in his preface says that he has
omitted altogether from his book Cinchona bark, because it
is “extremely dangerous.” This means that in regard to ague
he omitted the only efficient remedy—which was much more
unfortunate than his prescribing cobweb pills.

This book went to _thirty-six_ editions between 1747 and 1840.

* * * * *

“When shall our prayers end?”
I tell thee, priest, when shoemakers make shoes,
That are well sewed, with never a stitch amiss,
And use no craft in uttering of the same;
When tinkers make no more holes than they found,
When thatchers think their wages worth their work,
When Davie Diker digs and dallies not,
When horsecorsers beguile no friends with jades,
When printers pass no errors in their books,
When pewterers infect no tin with lead,
When silver sticks not on the Teller’s fingers,
When sycophants can find no place in Court, ...
When Laïs lives not like a lady’s peer
Nor useth art in dyeing of her hair....

GEORGE GASCOIGNE (1525?-1577) (_The Steele
Glas_).

* * * * *

All our life is a meeting of cross-roads, where the choice of directions is perilous.

VICTOR HUGO.

* * * * *

Rose-cheeked Laura, come;
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framed;
Heaven is music, and thy beauty’s
Birth is heavenly.
These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them,
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.

THOMAS CAMPION (died 1619).

Richard Lovelace (1618-1655) subsequently wrote (_Orpheus to
Beasts_):

O, could you view the melodie
Of ev’ry grace,
And musick of her face,
You’d drop a teare,
Seeing more harmonie
In her bright eye,
Then now you heare.

Then = _than_. See next quotation.

* * * * *

I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded blossom-like dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music?—to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years; concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy; blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman’s soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman’s love that moves us in a woman’s eyes—it seems to be a far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this _impersonal_ expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the woman’s soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to come in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Adam Bede_).

George Eliot would not know the preceding poem by Campion,
whose lyrics had been forgotten until A. H. Bullen revived them
in 1889; and most probably also she did not know Lovelace’s
poem, as it is not one of the two or three lyrics by which
alone he is remembered.

* * * * *

Alas, how soon the hours are over
Counted us out to play the lover!
And how much narrower is the stage
Allotted us to play the sage!
But when we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands! beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! What a chorus!

W. S. LANDOR.

* * * * *

The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet, and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man’s “intellectual nature,” and of his “moral nature,” as if these again were divisible and existed apart.... We ought to know, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_; that man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another _side_ of the one vital Force whereby he is and works?.... Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider it,—without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly _immoral_ man could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing, sympathize with it; that is, be _virtuously_ related to it.... Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small.

CARLYLE (_Heroes and Hero Worship, III_).

* * * * *

A little I will speak. I love thee then
Not only for thy body packed with sweet
Of all this world....
Not for this only do I love thee, but
Because Infinity upon thee broods;
And thou art full of whispers and of shadows.
Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say
So long, and yearnèd up the cliffs to tell;
Thou art what all the winds have uttered not,
What the still night suggesteth to the heart.
Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth,
Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;
Thy face remembered is from other worlds,
It has been died for, though I know not when,
It has been sung of, though I know not where.

STEPHEN PHILLIPS (_Marpessa_).

* * * * *

Sometimes thou seem’st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are.