Chapter D: G. Rossetti

* * * * *

Jesus saith, Wherever there are two, they are not without God; and wherever there is one alone, I say, I am with him. _Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I._

(_Logia of Jesus_).

This is one of the Logia or Sayings of Jesus written on papyrus
in the third century and discovered in Egypt by Grenfell and
Hunt in 1897. The italics, of course, are mine.

* * * * *

The first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.

* * * * *

Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

* * * * *

There are quarrels in which even Satan, bringing help, were not unwelcome; even Satan, fighting stiffly, might cover himself with glory—of a temporary nature.

* * * * *

... Nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species.

* * * * *

Thou art bound hastily for the City of _Nowhere_; and wilt arrive!

CARLYLE (_French Revolution_).

It is interesting to learn from a correspondent of _The
Spectator_ (Feb. 17, 1917) that Carlyle wrote two verses which
he combined with Shakespeare’s “Fear no more the heat o’ the
sun” (Cymbeline iv, 2) to make a requiem, of which he was very
fond:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Hurts thee now no harsh behest,
Toil, or shame, or sin, or danger;
Trouble’s storm has got to rest,
To his place the wayworn stranger.

Want is done, and grief and pain,
Done is all thy bitter weeping:
Thou art safe from wind and rain
In the Mother’s bosom sleeping.

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages:
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.

* * * * *

It takes two for a kiss,
Only one for a sigh;
Twain by twain we marry,
One by one we die.
Joy has its partnerships,
Grief weeps alone;
Cana had many guests,
Gethsemane had none.

FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES.

Byron in “Don Juan” says:

All who joy would win must share it,
Happiness was born a twin.

* * * * *

(Speaking of the rare and exalted nature of Dorothea, who has adopted the normal, domestic married life) Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me, as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).

This passage, which finely expresses an important truth, is
at the end of _Middlemarch_. The reference is to a story of
Herodotus. He says that Cyrus, the Persian, was angry with
the river Gyndes (Diyalah), because it had drowned one of the
white horses, which, as being sacred to the sun, accompanied
the expedition. He, therefore, employed his army to divert the
river into 360 channels (representing the number of days in the
year). The story was probably told to Herodotus as explaining
the great irrigation system that existed in Mesopotamia. The
Diyalah flows into the Tigris not far from Baghdad.

* * * * *

Any sort of meaning looks intense
When all beside itself means and looks nought.

R. BROWNING (_Fra Lippo Lippi_).

* * * * *

Hold, Time, a little while thy glass,
And, Youth, fold up those peacock wings!
More rapture fills the years that pass
Than any hope the future brings;
Some for to-morrow rashly pray,
And some desire to hold to-day.
But I am sick for yesterday....

Ah! who will give us back the past?
Ah! woe, that youth should love to be
Like this swift Thames that speeds so fast,
And is so fain to find the sea,—
That leaves this maze of shadow and sleep,
These creeks down which blown blossoms creep,
For breakers of the homeless deep.

EDMUND GOSSE (_Desiderium_).

* * * * *

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies,
When love is done.

F. W. BOURDILLON.

See reference to this poem in Preface.

* * * * *

But to come again unto Apelles, this was his manner and custom besides, which he perpetually observed, that no day went over his head, but what businesse soever he had otherwise to call him away, he would make one draught or other (and never misse) for to exercise his hand and keepe it in use, inasmuch as from him grew the proverbe, _Nulla dies sine linea_, _i.e._ Be alwaies doing somewhat, though you doe but draw a line. His order was when he had finished a piece of work or painted table, and layd it out of his hand, to set it forth in some open gallerie or thorowfare, to be seen of folke that passed by, and himselfe would lie close behind it to hearken what faults were found therewith; preferring the judgment of the common people before his owne, and imagining they would spy more narrowly, and censure his doings sooner than himselfe: and as the tale is told, it fell out upon a time, that a shoomaker as he went by seemed to controlle his workmanship about the shoo or pantofle that he had made to a picture, and namely, that there was one latchet fewer than there should be: Apelles acknowledging that the man said true indeed, mended that fault by the next morning, and set forth his table as his manner was. The same shoomaker comming again the morrow after, and finding the want supplied which he noted the day before, took some pride unto himselfe, that his former admonition had sped so well, and was so bold as to cavil at somewhat about the leg. Apelles could not endure that, but putting forth his head from behind the painted table, and scorning thus to be checked and reproved, Sirrha (quoth hee) remember you are but a shoomaker, and therefore meddle no higher I advise you, than with shoos. Which words also of his came afterwards to be a common proverbe, _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_.

PLINY (_Natural History_).

_Apelles_, the greatest painter of antiquity. The two proverbs
mean: “No day without a line,” “A cobbler should stick to his
last.” _Pantofle_, sandal; _latchet_, the thong fastening the
sandal; _painted table_, panel picture; _controlle_, find fault
with.

* * * * *

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow,
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud of the briar,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O, so white! O, so soft! O, so sweet is she!

BEN JONSON (_A Celebration of Charis_).

* * * * *

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud; a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

JOHN RUSKIN (_Stones of Venice II_, vi, 25).

* * * * *

The best of us are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck: can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

GEORGE ELIOT (_Janet’s Repentance_).

* * * * *

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke. She did lie
In her pavilion: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans....
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereïdes,
So many mermaids tended her. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands.

SHAKESPEARE (_Antony and Cleopatra_).

This and the next three quotations are word-pictures (see p.
85).

* * * * *

Little round Pepíta, blondest maid
In all Bedmar—Pepíta, fair yet flecked,
Saucy of lip and nose, of hair as red
As breasts of robins stepping on the snow—
Who stands in front with little tapping feet,
And baby-dimpled hands that hide enclosed
Those sleeping crickets, the dark castanets.

GEORGE ELIOT (_The Spanish Gypsy_).

* * * * *

And how then was the Devil drest?
Oh! he was in his Sunday’s best:
His jacket was red and his breeches were blue,
And there was a hole where the tail came through.

Over the hill and over the dale,
And he went over the plain,
And backward and forward he swished his long tail,
As a gentleman swishes his cane.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_The Devil’s Thoughts_).

The stanzas are reversed in order.

* * * * *

We walked abreast all up the street,
Into the market up the street;
Our hair with marigolds was wound,
Our bodices with love-knots laced,
Our merchandise with tansy[48] bound....

And when our chaffering all was done,
All was paid for, sold and done,
We drew a glove on ilka hand,
We sweetly curtsied, each to each,
And deftly danced a saraband.

WILLIAM BELL SCOTT (_The Witch’s Ballad_).

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

* * * * *

ON THE NONPAREIL

_Naught but himself can be his parallel._

With marble-coloured shoulders—and keen eyes
Protected by a forehead broad and white—
And hair cut close, lest it impede the sight,
And clenched hands, firm and of a punishing size,
Steadily held, or motioned wary-wise
To hit or stop—and kerchief, too, drawn tight
O’er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight
The inconstant wind, that all too often flies—
The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o’er
With joy to see a Chicken of her own,
Dips her rich pen in _claret_, and writes down
Under the letter R, first on the score,
“Randall—John—Irish Parents—age not known—
Good with both hands, and only ten stone four!”

PETER CORCORAN (_The Fancy, 1820_).

Randall was a pugilist of the time.

“None but himself can be his parallel” is a line from _The
Double Falsehood_ of Louis Theobald (1691-1744), but it comes
originally from Seneca (_Hercules Furens_, Act I, Sc. I):

Quaeris Alcidae parem?
Nemo est nisi ipse.

(Do you seek the equal of Alcides?
No one is except himself.)

I copied the above sonnet from _Gossip in a Library_ by Edmund
Gosse (1891), partly because Mr. Gosse said of it, “Anthologies
are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would
contain this very remarkable sonnet.” I hardly think this, but
the lines seem sufficiently interesting to quote.

* * * * *

Le roi disait, en la voyant si belle,
A son neveu:
“Pour un baiser, pour un sourire d’elle,
Pour un cheveu,
Infant Don Ruy, je donnerais l’Espagne
Et le Pérou!”
_Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne_
_Me rendra fou._

(The King, seeing her so beautiful, said to his nephew, “For one kiss, for a smile, for one hair of her head, Infante Don Ruy, I would give Spain and Peru.” _The wind that blows over the mountain will drive me mad._)

VICTOR HUGO (_Gastibelza_).

This charmingly extravagant praise of a lady’s beauty recalls
the story of another poet. The Eastern conqueror, Timur (or
Tamerlane), sent for the Persian poet Hafiz and very angrily
asked him, “Art thou he who offered to give my two great
cities, Samarkand and Bokhara, for the black mole on thy
mistress’s cheek?” Hafiz, however, cleverly escaped trouble by
replying, “Yes, sire, I always give freely, and in consequence
am now reduced to poverty. May I crave your kind assistance?”
Timur was amused at the reply and made the poet a present. The
story, however, is considered doubtful, because Timur did not
conquer Persia until some years after 1388, which is supposed
to be the date of the poet’s death.

* * * * *

Mere verbal insults (to a Roman Emperor) were not considered treason; for, said the Emperors Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius, in language that is a standing rebuke to pusillanimous tyrants, if the words are uttered in a spirit of frivolity, the attack merits contempt; if from madness, they excite pity; if from malice, they are to be forgiven.

WILLIAM A. HUNTER (1844-1898) (_Roman Law, Appendix_).

This recalls to mind the numerous cases of _lèse-majesté_
for words spoken against the Kaiser before the war. The
passage would make a pleasant retort to a rude opponent (a
“pusillanimous tyrant”) in a debate.

* * * * *

I have discovered that a feigned familiarity in great ones, is a note of certain usurpation on the less. For great and popular men feign themselves to be servants of others, to make these slaves to them. So the fisher provides bait for the trout, roach, dace, etc., that they may be food for him.

BEN JONSON (_Mores Aulici_).

* * * * *

Ci-gît ma femme, ah! qu’elle est bien,
Pour son repos—et pour le mien.

DU LORENS.

Paraphrased as:—

Here Abigail my wife doth lie;
She’s at peace and so am I.

* * * * *

GLADSTONE AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.

Mr. Gladstone’s relation to Psychical Research affords one more illustration of the width and force of his intellectual sympathies. Many men, even of high ability, if convinced as Mr. Gladstone was of the truth and sufficiency of the Christian revelation, permit themselves to ignore these experimental approaches to spiritual knowledge, as at best superfluous. They do not realize how profoundly the evidence, the knowledge, which we seek and which in some measure we find, must ultimately influence men’s views as to both the credibility and the adequacy of all forms of faith. Mr. Gladstone’s broad intellectual purview,—aided perhaps in this instance by something of the practical foresight of the statesman,—placed him in a quite different attitude towards our quest. “It is the most important work which is being done in the world,” he said in a conversation in 1885. “By far the most important,” he repeated, with a grave emphasis which suggested previous trains of thought, to which he did not care to give expression. He went on to apologize, in his courteous fashion, for his inability to render active help; and ended by saying “If you will accept sympathy without service, I shall be glad to join your ranks.” He became an Honorary Member, and followed with attention,—I know not with how much of study—the successive issues of our _Proceedings_. Towards the close of his life he desired that the _Proceedings_ should be sent to St. Deiniol’s Library, which he had founded at Hawarden; thus giving final testimony to his sense of the salutary nature of our work. From a man so immersed in other thought and labour that work could assuredly claim no more; from men profoundly and primarily interested in the spiritual world it ought, I think, to claim no less.

F. W. H. MYERS (_S.P.R. Journal, June, 1898_).

Apart from this interesting glimpse of Gladstone, it shows the
importance he attached to the work of the Society for Psychical
Research. To the severely orthodox, who think no evidence of
life after death should be sought outside “Revelation,” his
opinion should appeal. Every increase of knowledge is a further
“Revelation.” In the Bible we are told of one resurrection,
and there is certainly no reason why we should not seek the
evidence of others. We should not shut our eyes and close our
ears to new _Revelation_.

The Society has been thirty-eight years in existence and is
still insufficiently appreciated. Hodgson said in _The Forum_,
1896 “There are so many ways of looking at the world. It may
be a speck in space, or a huge cauldron with a graveyard for
its crust, a place in which to get a hunger and satisfy it,
the fighting ground for a while of dragon or ape, of Trojan or
Turk, an evolutionary drama that must end in ice or fire. Many
things it means to different men. One is busy with earthworms,
another with stars, another with the splendour of the day or
the strivings of the human soul. Numerous investigators are
hunting for further proofs that we came out of the mud, but
very few are seeking indications, in any scientific spirit,
of what may follow the toil and turmoil of our individual
existence here.”

Myers says: “The question of the survival of man is a branch of
experimental psychology. Is there, or is there not, evidence in
the actual observed phenomena of automatism, apparitions and
the like, for a transcendental energy in living men, or for an
influence emanating from personalities which have overpassed
the tomb? This is the definite question, which we can at least
intelligibly discuss, and which either we or our descendants
may some day hope to answer.”

* * * * *

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!

WORDSWORTH (_On the Death of James Hogg_).

* * * * *

Car, voyez-vous, la femme est, comme on dit, mon maître,
Un certain animal difficile à connoitre,
Et de qui la nature est fort encline au mal.

(A woman, look you, is a certain animal hard to understand and much inclined to mischief.)

MOLIÈRE (_Le Dépit Amoureux_).

* * * * *

Here, where sharp the sea-bird shrills his ditty,
Flickering flame-wise through the clear live calm,
Rose triumphal, crowning all a city,
Roofs exalted once with prayer and psalm,
Built of holy hands for holy pity,
Frank and fruitful as a sheltering palm.

Church and hospice wrought in faultless fashion,
Hall and chancel bounteous and sublime,
Wide and sweet and glorious as compassion,
Filled and thrilled with force of choral chime,
Filled with spirit of prayer and thrilled with passion,
Hailed a God more merciful than Time.

Ah, less mighty, less than Time prevailing,
Shrunk, expelled, made nothing at his nod,
Less than clouds across the sea-line sailing
Lies he, stricken by his master’s rod.
“Where is man?” the cloister murmurs wailing;
Back the mute shrine thunders—“Where is God?”

Here is all the end of all his glory—
Dust, and grass, and barren silent stones.
Dead, like him, one hollow tower and hoary
Naked in the sea-wind stands and moans,
Filled and thrilled with its perpetual story;
Here, where earth is dense with dead men’s bones.

Low and loud and long, a voice for ever,
Sounds the wind’s clear story like a song.
Tomb from tomb the waves devouring sever,
Dust from dust as years relapse along;
Graves where men made sure to rest and never
Lie dismantled by the seasons’ wrong.

Now displaced, devoured and desecrated,
Now by Time’s hands darkly disinterred,
These poor dead that sleeping here awaited
Long the archangel’s re-creating word,
Closed about with roofs and walls high-gated
Till the blast of judgment should be heard,

Naked, shamed, cast out of consecration,
Corpse and coffin, yea the very graves,
Scoffed at, scattered, shaken from their station,
Spurned and scourged of wind and sea like slaves,
Desolate beyond man’s desolation,
Shrink and sink into the waste of waves.

Tombs, with bare white piteous bones protruded,
Shroudless, down the loose collapsing banks,
Crumble, from their constant place detruded,
That the sea devours and gives not thanks.
Graves where hope and prayer and sorrow brooded
Gape and slide and perish, ranks on ranks.

Rows on rows and line by line they crumble,
They that thought for all time through to be.
Scarce a stone whereon a child might stumble
Breaks the grim field paced alone of me.
Earth, and man, and all their gods wax humble
Here, where Time brings pasture to the sea.

...

But afar on the headland exalted,
But beyond in the curl of the bay,
From the depth of his dome deep-vaulted
Our father is lord of the day.
Our father and lord that we follow,
For deathless and ageless is he;
And his robe is the whole sky’s hollow,
His sandal the sea.

Where the horn of the headland is sharper,
And her green floor glitters with fire,
The sea has the sun for a harper,
The sun has the sea for a lyre.
The waves are a pavement of amber,
By the feet of the sea-winds trod
To receive in a god’s presence-chamber
Our father, the God.

Time, haggard and changeful and hoary,
Is master and god of the land:
But the air is fulfilled of the glory
That is shed from our lord’s right hand.
O father of all of us ever,
All glory be only to thee
From heaven, that is void of thee never,
And earth, and the sea....

SWINBURNE (_By the North Sea_).

Swinburne introduced the new Hellenism or paganism, which was
followed by Pater and J. A. Symonds and ended with Oscar Wilde
(see p. 310 note.) Here Time is the supreme god who wrecks
Christian Churches, etc.

Although Swinburne had no important message to deliver, yet
by his wonderful mastery of metre and language he was of
tremendous service in transforming English Poetry (see p. 219.)
But in spite of the magical effect of his new melodies, he was
wanting in the art (of which Milton is the supreme example)
of varying his rhythm and accents. His extreme regularity,
notwithstanding the fine language and the splendid swing of
his verses, produces in his longer poems a certain effect of
monotony. Swinburne spoke of the “spavined and spur-galled
Pegasus” of George Eliot, but although she lacked his wonderful
lyric melody, she was more artistic and effective than he in
varying the rhythm of her verse. However, the immense influence
of Swinburne on all subsequent poetry can never be forgotten.
Even the dreary Iambic couplet in his hands was transformed
into music.

* * * * *

There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed—and scarcely one woman—love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of the persecution of the truth—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Table Talk_).

* * * * *

The old creeds grew out of human nature as genuinely as weeds and flowers out of the earth. It is well enough that the gardener, whose business it is to pull them up, should despise them as pigweed, wormwood, chickweed, shadblossom: so they are, out of their place; but the botanist picks up the same and recognizes them as Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth. _Natura nihil agit frustra._ Let us coax each to yield its last bud.

MONCURE D. CONWAY.

I have not Conway’s book _An Earthward Pilgrimage_ to refer to.
The latter part of the above is apparently a quotation from
Thoreau, as I remember it is so quoted by Emerson.

* * * * *

God is my witness, what hours of wretchedness I have spent at times, while reading the Bible devoutly from day to day, and reverencing every word of it as the Word of God, when petty contradictions met me which seemed to my reason to conflict with the notion of the absolute historical veracity of every part of Scripture, and which, as I felt, _in the study of any other book_ we should honestly treat as errors or mis-statements, without in the least detracting from the real value of the book! But in those days, I was taught that it was my duty to fling the suggestion from me at once, “as if it were a loaded shell shot into the fortress of my soul,” or to stamp out desperately, as with an iron heel, each spark of honest doubt, which God’s own gift, the love of truth, had kindled in my bosom.... I thank God that I was not able long to throw dust in the eyes of my own mind, and do violence to the love of truth in this way.

BISHOP COLENSO (1814-1883) (_Pentateuch_).

(See G. W. Cox’s _Life of Colenso_, I, 493.) Colenso’s
quotation, “as if it were a loaded shell,” etc., is from
Bishop Wilberforce. Cox mentions elsewhere that in one of
Wilberforce’s published sermons he speaks of a young man of
great promise dying in darkness and despair, because he had
indulged in doubt as to whether the sun and moon stood still
at Joshua’s bidding! Who, that went through the experiences of
those days, can ever forget them? We had been taught that we
“must believe” every word of the Bible to be divinely inspired
or else be eternally damned. And yet we realized that such
belief was absolutely impossible!

The horror with which Bishop Colenso’s revelations were
received in orthodox circles would to-day be scarcely credible,
and not until after the eighties were the results of the Higher
Criticism generally accepted.

* * * * *

Let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no difference between the two positions, “The Bible contains the religion revealed by God,” and “Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God”; and that whatever can be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may and must be said of each and every sentence of the Bible, taken for and by itself,—and I no longer wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim, “Wonderful!” when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.... I challenge these divines and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a belief in the modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and Wesley’s doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

* * * * *

For the Parsons are dumb dogs, turning round,
And scratching their hole in the warmest ground,
And laying them down in the sun to wink,
Drowsing, and dreaming, and thinking they think.
As they mumble the marrowless bones of morals,
Like toothless children gnawing their corals,
Gnawing their corals to soothe their gums
With a kind of watery thought that comes.

W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).

* * * * *

Why do we respect some vegetables, and despise others? The bean is a graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can put beans in poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. Corn—which, in my garden, grows alongside the bean, and, so far as I can see, with no affectation of superiority—is, however, the child of song. It “waves” in all literature.

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (_My Summer in a Garden_).

Mr. Yeats has, however, rescued the bean from its invidious
position (_The Lake Isle of Innisfree_):—

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Lady Middleton, a friend of old days in Adelaide and now in
England, reminded me of these lines.

* * * * *

Yet in my hid soul must a voice reply
Which knows not which may seem the viler gain,
To sleep for ever or be born again.
The blank repose or drear eternity.
A solitary thing it were to die
So late begotten and so early slain,
With sweet life withered to a passing pain
Till nothing anywhere should still be I.
Yet if for evermore I must convey
These weary senses thro’ an endless day
And gaze on God with these exhausted eyes,
I fear that howsoe’er the seraphs play
My life shall not be theirs nor I as they,
But homeless in the heart of Paradise.

F. W. H. MYERS (1843-1901) (_Immortality_).

This is from Myers’ _Poems_, 1870, and is one of a pair of
sonnets. I do not quote the first in full because its meaning
seems obscure, but the last six lines on the shortness of life
as compared with eternity are as follow:

Lo, all that age is as a speck of sand
Lost on the long beach where the tides are free,
And no man metes it in his hollow hand
Nor cares to ponder it, how small it be;
At ebb it lies forgotten on the land
And at full tide forgotten in the sea.

In the second sonnet quoted above, Myers is not merely
referring to the Biblical account of the future life in heaven
as consisting in endless worship—which, if taken literally
instead of symbolically, would certainly mean a “drear
eternity.” The suggestion is that there must be some equivalent
to work, thought, activity, progress, and definite aims to make
eternal life preferable to annihilation. (I am reminded here of
a curious statement made by the great Adam Smith, “What can be
added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out
of debt, and has a clear conscience!”) Myers ultimately came
to the definite conclusion that the future life will be one of
continued progress.

His name, Myers, is purely English, not Jewish. This gifted man
was not only a fine poet, but also an important essayist and a
remarkable classical scholar. He, Hodgson, and others formed
the small band of able men who threw everything else aside and
devoted their lives to Psychical Research. Myers’ best poems
appeared in _The Renewal of Youth and other Poems_, 1882, and
it was no doubt a loss to poetry that during the remaining
eighteen years of his life he added little, if anything, more.
However, he and Hodgson considered that the work to which they
had devoted themselves was of the very highest importance.
_Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_, the
important work in which Myers embodied his conclusions, was
left incomplete at his death, but Hodgson, with Miss Alice
Johnson’s assistance, completed and edited it.

Myers was quite satisfied before his death, in 1901, that the
evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research had
already established in itself the fact of survival after death.
But the interesting fact is that during the nineteen years
since he “passed over to the other side” he has apparently
been the principal agent in adding greatly to that evidence.
There is every reason to believe that Myers has personally been
communicating and arranging and directing much of the evidence
that has since been given.

* * * * *

It is not the essayist’s duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected of him. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger.... The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature.

ALEXANDER SMITH (_On the Writing of Essays_).

* * * * *

Time takes them home that we loved, fair names and famous,
To the soft long sleep, to the broad sweet bosom of death;
But the flower of their souls he shall not take away to shame us,
Nor the lips lack song for ever that now lack breath;
For with us shall the music and perfume that die not dwell,
Though the dead to our dead bid welcome, and we farewell.

SWINBURNE (_In Memory of Barry Cornwall_).

* * * * *

MIMNERMUS IN CHURCH

You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm kind world is all I know.

You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then,
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend’s remembered tones.

Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

WILLIAM (JOHNSON) CORY (1823-1892).

Mimnermus was a fine Greek elegiac poet—about 630-600 B.C.

* * * * *

MORS ET VITA

We know not yet what life shall be,
What shore beyond earth’s shore be set;
What grief awaits us, or what glee,
We know not yet.

Still, somewhere in sweet converse met,
Old friends, we say, beyond death’s sea
Shall meet and greet us, nor forget

Those days of yore, those years when we
Were loved and true—but will death let
Our eyes the longed-for vision see?
We know not yet.

SAMUEL WADDINGTON.

The evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research
indicates that friends do certainly meet. See the remarkably
convincing _Ear of Dionysius_, lately published, where Dr.
Verrall and Professor Butcher are clearly having a great time
together on the other side.

* * * * *

Art—which I may style the love of loving, rage
Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things
For truth’s sake, whole and sole,—nor any good, truth brings
The knower, seer, feeler beside.

R. BROWNING (_Fifine at the Fair_).

* * * * *

De par le Roy dèfense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.

(By order of the King, God is forbidden
To work miracles in this place.)

ANON.

The teaching of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) led to an
important evangelical movement in the Roman Catholic Church.
When, however, the Jansenists became subjected to persecution,
the usual result followed that numbers of them became fanatics.
The more corrupt the French Court and Society became, the
more frenzied became this fanaticism. In 1727 the Jansenist
deacon, Pâris, a man of very holy life, was buried in the St.
Médard churchyard, and shortly afterwards miracles were said
to take place at his tomb. In consequence large crowds of
_convulsionnaires_ assembled there and very shocking scenes
were enacted, men and women in hysterical and epileptic fits
and ecstatic delirium, eating the earth of the grave and
inflicting frightful tortures on themselves and each other.
When in 1732 the Court interposed and closed the churchyard
some wit wrote the above couplet on the gate.

Mr. King in his _Classical and Foreign Quotations_ has “De
faire _des miracles_,” but the above version seems correct (See
_Larousse_.)

* * * * *

And Christians love in the turf to lie,
Not in watery graves to be—
Nay, the very fishes would _sooner_ die
On the land than in the sea.

THOMAS HOOD.

* * * * *

There are two things that fill my soul with a holy reverence and an ever-growing wonder: the spectacle of the starry sky, that virtually annihilates us as physical beings; and the moral law which raises us to infinite dignity as intelligent agents.

* * * * *

The _ought_ expresses a kind of necessity, a kind of connection of actions with their grounds or reasons, such as is to be found nowhere else in the whole natural world. For of the natural world our understanding can know nothing except what is, what has been, or what will be. We cannot say that anything in it ought to be other than it actually was, is, or will be. In fact, so long as we are considering the course of nature, the _ought_ has no meaning whatever. We can as little inquire what ought to happen in nature as we can inquire what properties a circle ought to have.

IMMANUEL KANT.

The first quotation (from the _Kritik of Practical Reason_)
appears to be the same passage that is often rendered in such
words as these: “Two things fill my soul with awe—the starry
heavens in the still night, and the sense of duty in man.”

* * * * *

The whole earth
The beauty wore of promise—that which sets
The budding rose above the rose full-blown.

W. WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude, Bk. XI_).

* * * * *

(——) is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Table Talk_).

* * * * *

It isn’t raining rain to me,
It’s raining daffodils.
In every dimpled drop I see
Wild flowers on the hills.
The clouds of grey engulf the day
And overwhelm the town:
It isn’t raining rain to me,
It’s raining roses down.

ROBERT LOVEMAN.

* * * * *

Let us reflect that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those, who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so high again.

N. HAWTHORNE (_Transformation_).

* * * * *

One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By and by, other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.

At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in one direction, and to work in another.... There are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf.

RICHARD JEFFERIES (_The Story of My Heart_).

* * * * *

Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.

R. W. EMERSON (_The World-Soul_).

Emerson is always an optimist.

* * * * *

Place thyself, oh, lovely fair!
Where a thousand mirrors are;
Though a thousand faces shine,
’Tis but one—and that is thine.
Then the Painter’s skill allow,
Who could frame so fair a brow.
What are lustrous eyes of flame,
What are cheeks, the rose that shame,
What are glances wild and free,
Speech, and shape, and voice—but He?

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

* * * * *

And here the Singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead
‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart
Is in itself a deed.’

TENNYSON (_Charge of the Heavy Brigade_).

* * * * *

I knew a very wise man that believed that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

FLETCHER of Saltoun (_Letter to Montrose and others_).

What would the wise man have said of “It’s a long, long way to
Tipperary”?

* * * * *

FIRST LOVE

O my earliest love, who, ere I number’d
Ten sweet summers, made my bosom thrill!
Will a swallow—or a swift, or some bird—
Fly to her and say, I love her still?

Say my life’s a desert drear and arid,
To its one green spot I aye recur:
Never, never—although three times married—
Have I cared a jot for aught but her.

No, mine-own! though early forced to leave you,
Still my heart was there where first we met;
In those “Lodgings with an ample sea-view,”
Which were, forty years ago, “To let.”

There I saw her first, our landlord’s oldest
Little daughter. On a thing so fair
Thou, O Sun,—who (so they say) beholdest
Everything,—hast gazed, I tell thee, ne’er.

There she sat—so near me, yet remoter
Than a star—a blue-eyed bashful imp:
On her lap she held a happy bloater,
’Twixt her lips a yet more happy shrimp.

And I loved her, and our troth we plighted
On the morrow by the shingly shore:
In a fortnight to be disunited
By a bitter fate for evermore.

O my own, my beautiful, my blue-eyed!
To be young once more, and bite my thumb
At the world and all its cares with you, I’d
Give no inconsiderable sum.

Hand in hand we tramp’d the golden seaweed,
Soon as o’er the gray cliff peep’d the dawn:
Side by side, when came the hour for tea, we’d
Crunch the mottled shrimp and hairy prawn:—

Has she wedded some gigantic shrimper,
That sweet mite with whom I loved to play?
Is she girt with babes that whine and whimper,
That bright being who was always gay?

Yes—she has at least a dozen wee things!
Yes—I see her darning corduroys,
Scouring floors, and setting out the tea-things
For a howling herd of hungry boys

In a home that reeks of tar and sperm-oil!
But at intervals she thinks, I know,
Of those days which we, afar from turmoil,
Spent together forty years ago.

O my earliest love, still unforgotten,
With your downcast eyes of dreamy blue!
Never, somehow, could I seem to cotton
To another as I did to you!