Chapter C: S. CALVERLEY (Beer)

These are the two last verses of a parody on Byron. In each of
the last three lines there is a literary reference. The first,
of course, is to the happy-go-lucky Dick Swiveller of Dickens’s
_Old Curiosity Shop_.

The next reference is to the amusing story about Sir Walter
Scott that became known about the time Calverley was writing
(1862). Scott, in his description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight
(“Lay of the Last Minstrel”) says:

If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey....

Yet there can be no doubt that _he himself had never seen_ the
Abbey by moonlight! He further tells his readers that they can

_Home returning, soothly_ swear
Was never scene so sad and fair.

They, having seen it, can “soothly” (_i.e._, _truthfully_)
swear to its beauty, which was more than he himself could!

Calverley’s last line is from Sydney Smith’s “Recipe for a
Salad”:

Oh, herbaceous treat!
’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl;
Serenely full the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me—I have dined to-day.”

This again is an adaptation of Dryden’s “Imitation of Horace”
(Book III, Ode 29):

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call to-day his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d to-day.

* * * * *

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart:
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man can not live without cooks.

He may live without books—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?

EARL OF LYTTON, “OWEN MEREDITH” (1831-1891)
(_Lucile_).

* * * * *

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
“Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed—
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.”

LEWIS CARROLL (_The Walrus and the Carpenter_).

* * * * *

That all-softening, overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul—the dinner bell.

BYRON (_Don Juan_).

* * * * *

First of the first,
Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as now
Perfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child..
My rose, I gather for the breast of God..
And surely not so very much apart,
Need I place thee, my warrior-priest..
In thought, word and deed,
How throughout all thy warfare thou wast pure,
I find it easy to believe: and if
At any fateful moment of the strange
Adventure, the strong passion of that strait,
Fear and surprise may have revealed too much,—
As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,
Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness,—so, perchance,
Might the surprise and fear release too much
The perfect beauty of the body and soul
Thou savedst in thy passion for God’s sake,
He who is Pity. Was the trial sore?
Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his feet,
And so be pedestaled in triumph?

R. BROWNING (_The Ring and the Book, X_).

A young handsome priest, who had led a gay life, was moved by
pure motives to rescue a beautiful young wife from a dreadful
husband, and he travelled with her for three days to Rome.
The husband was following with an armed band, the priest was
risking disgrace, and the girl was risking death. The mutual
danger would in itself tend to draw the fugitives too closely
together; but also the girl had shown herself doubly lovable,
for the strain and stress had revealed in her a very beautiful
nature—just as a midnight thunder-storm opens and draws rich
scent from

Some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness.

Coleridge has a similar illustration, “Quarrels of anger ending
in tears are favourable to love in its spring tide, as plants
are found to grow very rapidly after a thunderstorm with
rain”—(Allsop’s _Letters, etc., of Coleridge_). Coleridge died
in 1834, and “The Ring and the Book” was published in 1868-9:
it is curious that both poets should have been impressed with
a fact that appears to have been only recently recognized.
In the seventies Lemström proved that plants thrive under
electricity; but I think it is only a few years ago that in
some agricultural experiments in Germany it was found that
electricity was of no benefit to the crops _without rain or
other moisture_.

The quotation is from the fine judgment which the Pope delivers.

* * * * *

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

SWIFT (_Gulliver’s Travels_).

* * * * *

A child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.

(_Love’s Labour Lost, I, 1._)

* * * * *

The whole World was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman: Man is the whole World, and the Breath of God; Woman the rib and crooked piece of man.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682) (_Religio Medici_).

* * * * *

Give me but what this ribband bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round!

EDMUND WALLER (1606-1687) (_On a Girdle_).

* * * * *

A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with.

J. P. F. RICHTER (_Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces_).

* * * * *

If she be made of white and red
Her faults will ne’er be known.

(_Love’s Labour Lost, I, 2_).

* * * * *

God made the world in six days, and then he rested. He then made man and rested again. He then made woman and, since then, neither man, woman, nor anything else has rested.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me.

ROBERT HERRICK (_To Anthea_).

* * * * *

As perchance carvers do not faces make,
But that away, which hid them there, do take:
Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee,
And be his Image, or not his, but He.

JOHN DONNE (_The Cross_).

As sculptors chisel away the marble that hides the statue
within, so let “crosses” or afflictions remove the impurities
which hide the Christ in us, so that we shall become His image,
or not His _image_, but _Himself_.

* * * * *

What is experience? A little cottage made with the _débris_ of those palaces of gold and marble which we call our _illusions_.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

SHELLEY (_Adonaïs, an Elegy on Keats, XL_).

This verse is engraved on Shelley’s own monument in the Priory
Church at Christchurch, Hampshire.

* * * * *

A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Table Talk_).

This was about 1819. It is pathetic, this meeting of two great
poets, Keats who was to die two years afterwards at the early
age of twenty-six, and Coleridge, whose few brilliant years
of poetic life had long previously ended in slavery to the
opium-habit.

* * * * *

THE BALLAD OF JUDAS ISCARIOT

’Twas the body of Judas Iscariot
Lay in the Field of Blood;
’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Beside the body stood.

Black was the earth by night,
And black was the sky;
Black, black were the broken clouds,
Tho’ the red Moon went by....

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,
So grim, and gaunt, and gray,
Raised the body of Judas Iscariot,
And carried it away.

...

For days and nights he wandered on
Upon an open plain,
And the days went by like blinding mist,
And the nights like rushing rain.

He wandered east, he wandered west,
And heard no human sound;
For months and years, in grief and tears,
He wandered round and round....

...

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,
Strange, and sad, and tall,
Stood all alone at dead of night
Before a lighted hall.

And the wold was white with snow,
And his foot-marks black and damp,
And the ghost of the silvern Moon arose,
Holding her yellow lamp.

And the icicles were on the eaves,
And the walls were deep with white,
And the shadows of the guests within
Pass’d on the window light.

The shadows of the wedding guests
Did strangely come and go,
And the body of Judas Iscariot
Lay stretch’d along the snow.

The body of Judas Iscariot
Lay stretched along the snow;
’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Ran swiftly to and fro.

To and fro, and up and down,
He ran so swiftly there,
As round and round the frozen Pole
Glideth the lean white bear.

’Twas the Bridegroom sat at the table-head,
And the lights burnt bright and clear—
“Oh, who is that,” the Bridegroom said,
“Whose weary feet I hear?”

’Twas one look’d from the lighted hall,
And answered soft and slow,
“It is a wolf runs up and down
With a black track in the snow.”

The Bridegroom in his robe of white
Sat at the table-head—
“Oh, who is that who moans without?”
The blessed Bridegroom said.

’Twas one looked from the lighted hall,
And answered fierce and low
“’Tis the soul of Judas Iscariot
Gliding to and fro.”

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Did hush itself and stand.
And saw the Bridegroom at the door
With a light in his hand.

The Bridegroom stood in the open door,
And he was clad in white,
And far within the Lord’s Supper
Was spread so broad and bright.

The Bridegroom shaded his eyes and look’d,
And his face was bright to see—
“What dost thou here at the Lord’s Supper
With thy body’s sins?” said he.

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Stood black, and sad, and bare—
“I have wandered many nights and days;
There is no light elsewhere.”

’Twas the wedding guests cried out within,
And their eyes were fierce and bright—
“Scourge the soul of Judas Iscariot
Away into the night!”

The Bridegroom stood in the open door,
And he waved hands still and slow,
And the third time that he waved his hands
The air was thick with snow.

And of every flake of falling snow,
Before it touched the ground,
There came a dove, and a thousand doves
Made sweet sound.

’Twas the body of Judas Iscariot
Floated away full fleet,
And the wings of the doves that bare it off
Were like its winding-sheet.

’Twas the Bridegroom stood at the open door,
And beckon’d, smiling sweet;
’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Stole in, and fell at his feet.

“The Holy Supper is spread within,
And the many candles shine,
And I have waited long for thee
Before I poured the wine!”

The supper wine is poured at last,
The lights burn bright and fair,
Iscariot washes the Bridegroom’s feet,
And dries them with his hair.

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

See reference to Buchanan in the Preface.

* * * * *

Now, as of old,
Man by himself is priced:
For thirty pieces Judas sold
Himself, not Christ.

HESTER CHOLMONDELEY.

I learn from the _New Statesman_ reviewer of the first English
Edition that these lines were by Hester, a gifted sister of
Mary Cholmondeley. She died at 22.

* * * * *

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

ALEXANDER SMITH (_On the Writing of Essays_).

* * * * *

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.

SYDNEY SMITH.

* * * * *

In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstances of their universal admission. Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Aids to Reflection_).

* * * * *

I have given no man of my fruit to eat,
I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine,
This wine and bread without lees or leaven,
We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,
Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,
One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.

In the change of years, in the coil of things,
In the clamour and rumour of life to be,
We, drinking love at the furthest springs,
Covered with love as a covering tree,
We had grown as gods, as the gods above,
Filled from the heart to the lips with love,
Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings,
O love, my love, had you loved but me!

We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved
As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen
Grief collapse as a thing disproved,
Death consume as a thing unclean,
Twain halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past;
Had you loved me once, as you have not loved;
Had the chance been with us that has not been.

SWINBURNE (_The Triumph of Time_).

* * * * *

But she is far away
Now; nor the hours of night grown hoar
Bring yet to me, long gazing from the door,
The wind-stirred robe of roseate grey
And rose-crown of the hour that leads the day
When we shall meet once more.

Oh sweet her bending grace
Then when I kneel beside her feet;
And sweet her eyes o’erhanging heaven; and sweet
The gathering folds of her embrace;
And her fall’n hair at last shed round my face
When breaths and tears shall meet ...

Ah! by a colder wave
On deathlier airs the hour must come
Which to thy heart, my love, shall call me home.
Between the lips of the low cave
Against that night the lapping waters lave,
And the dark lips are dumb.

But there Love’s self doth stand,
And with Life’s weary wings far-flown,
And with Death’s eyes that make the water moan,
Gathers the water in his hand:
And they that drink know nought of sky or land
But only love alone.