Chapter D: G. ROSSETTI (Heart’s Compass)

* * * * *

“IMBUTA”

The new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old,
The heart is all athirst again,
The drops are all of gold;
We thought the cup was broken,
And we thought the tale was told,
But the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!

The flower of life had faded,
The leaf was in its fall,
The winter seemed so early
To have reached us, once for all;
But now the buds are breaking,
There is grass above the mould,
And the new wine, the new wine.
It tasteth like the old!

The earth had grown so dreary,
The sky so dull and grey;
One was weeping in the darkness,
One was sorrowing through the day:
But a light from heaven gleams again,
On water, wood, and wold,
And the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!

For the loving lips are laughing,
And the loving face is fair,
Though a phantom hand is on the board,
And phantom eyes are there;
The phantom eyes are soft and sad,
The phantom hand is cold,
But the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!

We dare not look, we turn away,
The precious draught to drain,
’Twere worse than madness, surely now,
To lose it all again;
To quivering lip, with clinging grasp,
The fatal cup we hold,
For the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!
And life is short, and love is life,
And so the tale is told,
Though the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old.

G. J. WHYTE-MELVILLE.

The title evidently refers to _Horace_ Ep. 1, 2, 69, 70, Quo
semel est _Imbuta_ recens servabit odorem testa diu. “The scent
which once has flavoured the fresh jar will be preserved in it
for many a day.” Moore no doubt had the same passage in his
mind when, speaking of the memories of past joys, he wrote:

You may break, you may ruin the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

So Whyte-Melville says that when love is poured again into the
heart of a man who has lost his first love, “The new wine, the
new wine, It tasteth like the old.”

* * * * *

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

W. S. LANDOR.

* * * * *

The Toucan has an enormous bill, makes a noise like a puppy dog, and lays his eggs in hollow trees. How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of nature! To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? The Toucans, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose were gentlemen in Bond Street created? To what purpose were certain foolish prating Members of Parliament created?—pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not enter into the metaphysics of the Toucan.

SYDNEY SMITH (_Review of “Waterton’s Travels in South America”_).

* * * * *

Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit abundant, for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth. Fastidious youth, which revolts at woman plumping her exquisite proportions on bread-and-butter, and would (we must suppose) joyfully have her scraggy to have her poetical, can hardly object to dewberries. Indeed the act of eating them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat: mouth, eye, and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weirfall’s thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful, that though he was making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither he followed her....

To-morrow this place will have a memory—the river and the meadow, and the white falling weir: his heart will build a temple here; and the skylark will be its high-priest, and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries.

GEORGE MEREDITH (_The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_).

* * * * *

LETTY’S GLOBE

When Letty had scarce passed her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a coloured sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peeped
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leaped
And laughed and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turned her sweet unlearnèd eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry—
“Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!”
And, while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.

CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER.

Charles Tennyson, a brother of Lord Tennyson and author with
him of _Poems by Two Brothers_, took the name of Turner.

* * * * *

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues.
So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world....
This is life to come,
Which martyr’d men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty—
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense,
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

GEORGE ELIOT.

There is an infinite pathos in these lines. Having lost her
faith in a future life, George Eliot tries to find consolation
in the thought that, when she has passed into nothingness—when
she “joins the choir invisible”—she will have done something to
ennoble the minds of those who come after her. But why should
generation after generation of insect-lives waste themselves in
raising and purifying the minds of the generations that follow,
if all in turn pass into nothingness? The higher and purer men
became, the more they would love their fellow-beings and the
more they would shudder at the insensate pain and cruelty in
the world—the physical torture they themselves endure, and the
mental torture both of losing for ever those they love and of
seeing the sufferings of others. One should act in conformity
with one’s belief. Instead of thus adding greater pain and
sorrow to each succeeding generation, the effort should be to
coarsen and brutalize our natures, so that love, duty, and
moral aspiration shall disappear, and we shall cease to be
saddened by the appalling cruelty of our existence. Our lives
should, in fact, correspond with the brutal, ugly and stupid
scheme of the universe.

This is the direct answer to George Eliot, allowing her very
important assumption _that we have a duty towards others_,
including those who come after us. But this assumption is
logically unwarranted, if at the end of our brief years we
pass into nothingness and have no further concern with any
living being. This brings us to a familiar train of argument.
Why should we be irresistibly impelled to sacrifice ourselves
for the good of others? And, apart from altruism, why should
we develop _our own_ higher attributes—why seek to ennoble
our own selves, since those selves disappear? Why fill with
jewels the hollow log that is to be thrown on the fire? Why
are we swayed by a sense of honour, a desire for justice, a
love of purity and truth and beauty, a craving for affection,
a thirst for knowledge, which persist up to the very gates of
death? To take an illustration of Edward Caird’s, is not the
path of life which is so traversed like the path of a star
to the astronomer, which enables him to prophesy its future
course—beyond the end which hides it from our eyes? Otherwise,
to use another simile, it is as though Pheidias spent his life
sculpturing in snow.

(This does not mean, as the sceptic usually sneers, that the
virtuous man merely desires a reward for his virtuous conduct.
It is an inquiry why he _is_ virtuous—what is a sane view of
the scheme of the universe.)

In forming the conclusion that there was no possible future for
man, George Eliot and an immense number of other thinkers of
her time made also the vast assumption that there was nothing
left to discover. Blanco White’s sonnet alone might have taught
them the folly of such premature judgments. Or we may take an
illustration, used by F. W. H. Myers, namely, the discovery
that, far beyond the red and the violet of the spectrum or the
rainbow, extend rays that have been (and will for ever be)
invisible to our eyes. Since George Eliot’s time the Society
for Psychical Research has during the last thirty-five years
accumulated unanswerable evidence of survival after death.

* * * * *

Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
“There is no joy but calm!”
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?...

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

TENNYSON (_The Lotos-Eaters_).

See preceding quotation.

* * * * *

We may well begin to doubt whether the known and the natural can suffice for human life. No sooner do we try to think so than pessimism raises its head. The more our thoughts widen and deepen, as the universe grows upon us and we become accustomed to boundless space and time, the more petrifying is the contrast of our own insignificance, the more contemptible become the pettiness, shortness, fragility of the individual life. A moral paralysis creeps upon us. For awhile we comfort ourselves with the notion of self-sacrifice; we say, what matter if I pass, let me think of others! But the _other_ has become contemptible no less than the self; all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth increasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point; good and evil, right and wrong become infinitesimal ephemeral matters, while eternity and infinity remain attributes of that only which is outside the sphere of morality. Life becomes more intolerable the more we know and discover, so long as everything widens and deepens except our own duration, and that remains as pitiful as ever. The affections die away in a world where everything great and enduring is cold; they die of their own conscious feebleness and bootlessness.

SIR J. R. SEELEY (_Natural Religion_).

See the two preceding quotations.

* * * * *

Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear;
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.

W. S. LANDOR

* * * * *

LOVE-SWEETNESS

Sweet dimness of her loosened hair’s downfall
About thy face; her sweet hands round thy head
In gracious fostering union garlanded;
Her tremulous smiles; her glances’ sweet recall
Of love; her murmuring sighs memorial;
Her mouth’s culled sweetness by thy kisses shed
On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led
Back to her mouth which answers there for all:—
What sweeter than these things, except the thing
In lacking which all these would lose their sweet:—
The confident heart’s still fervour: the swift beat
And soft subsidence of the spirit’s wing,
Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring,
The breath of kindred plumes against its feet?