Chapter D: G. ROSSETTI (The Stream’s Secret)

* * * * *

Behold, my lord, what monsters muster here,
With Angels’ faces, and harmful, hellish hearts,
With smiling looks, and deep deceitful thoughts,
With tender skins, and stony cruel minds....
The younger sort come piping on apace
In whistles made of fine enticing wood,
Till they have caught the birds for whom they brided.
The elder sort go stately stalking on,
And on their backs they bear both land and fee,
Castles and Towers, revénues and receipts,
Lordships and manors, fines, yea farms and all.
What should these be? (Speak you, my lovely lord!)
They be not men: for why? they have no beards.
They be no boys, which wear such side-long gowns.
What be they? women, masking in men’s weeds,
With dutchkin doublets and with jerkins jagged,
With Spanish spangs and ruffs set out of France.
They be so sure even _Wo_ to _Men_ indeed.
High time it were for my poor muse to wink,
Since all the hands, all paper, pen and ink,
Which ever yet this wretched world possessed,
Cannot describe this Sex in colours due.

GASCOIGNE (_The Steele Glas_, 1576).

* * * * *

I’m not denying the women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Adam Bede_).

* * * * *

They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

J. R. LOWELL (_Stanzas on Freedom_).

* * * * *

The Baptist might be in the Wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and denunciations of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse, over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful, because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Myths alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh: if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.

W. M. THACKERAY (_Pendennis, XXIII_).

* * * * *

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.

R. L. STEVENSON (_Pulvis et Umbra_).

* * * * *

Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.

WORDSWORTH (_Ode to Duty_).

* * * * *

A CHARGE.

If thou has squander’d years to grave a gem
Commission’d by thy absent Lord, and while
’Tis incomplete,
Others would bribe thy needy skill to them—
Dismiss them to the street!

Should’st thou at last discover Beauty’s grove,
At last be panting on the fragrant verge,
But in the track,
Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love—
Turn at her bidding back.

When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears,
And every spectre mutters up more dire
To snatch control
And loose to madness thy deep-kennell’d Fears—
Then to the helm, O Soul!

Last; if upon the cold green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,
Both castaway,
And one must perish—let it not be he
Whom thou art sworn to obey!

HERBERT TRENCH (_Born 1865_).

* * * * *

Human nature, trained in the School of Christianity, throws away as false the delineation of piety in the disguise of Hebe, and declares that there is something higher than happiness—that thought which is ever full of care and truth is better far—that all true and disinterested affection, which often is called to mourn, is better still—that the devoted allegiance of conscience to duty and to God—which ever has in it more of penitence than of joy—is noblest of all.

JAMES MARTINEAU (_Endeavours after the Christian Life, p. 42_).

* * * * *

There is in man a _Higher_ than Love of Happiness; he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same _Higher_ that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which God-inspired Doctrine art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heavens! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou become contrite and learn it! O thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain; thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to be annihilated.... Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.... To the _Worship of Sorrow_, ascribe what origin and genesis thou pleasest, has not that Worship originated, and been generated? Is it not _here_? Feel it in thy heart, and then say whether it is of God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion.... Do the Duty which liest nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty. The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. The Ideal is in thyself.

THOMAS CARLYLE (_Sartor Resartus_).

The belief that the sense of duty and moral aspiration arise
from within ourselves, and are the cause rather than the result
of sociological evolution is far more widespread to-day than in
what Carlyle calls his “atheistical century.” The “Everlasting
Yea” is opposed to the “Everlasting No” of nescience.

* * * * *

He that hath found some fledged bird’s nest may know
At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now
That is to him unknown.

HENRY VAUGHAN (_Friends Departed_).

For the subject of the verse see title of poem.

* * * * *

Must it last for ever,
The passionate endeavour,
Ah, have ye, there in heaven, hearts to throb and still aspire?
In the life you know now,
Rendered white as snow now,
Do fresher glory-heights arise, and beckon higher—higher?
Are you dreaming, dreaming,
Is your soul still roaming,
Still gazing upward as we gazed, of old in the autumn gloaming?

But ah, that pale moon roaming
Thro’ fleecy mists of gloaming,
Furrowing with pearly edge the jewel-powder’d sky,
And ah, the days departed
With your friendship gentle-hearted,
And ah, the dream we dreamt that night, together you and I!
Is it fashioned wisely,
To help us or to blind us,
That at each height we gain we turn, and behold a heaven behind us?

R. BUCHANAN (_To David in Heaven_).

David Gray was a young poet and a great friend of Buchanan’s.
Another verse in the poem is:

In some heaven star-lighted,
Are you now united
Unto the poet-spirits that you loved of English race?
Is Chatterton still dreaming?
And, to give it stately seeming,
Has the music of his last strong song passed into Keats’s face?
Is Wordsworth there? and Spenser?
Beyond the grave’s black portals,
Can the grand eye of Milton _see_ the glory he sang to mortals?

* * * * *

What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Angelo and me
To cover.

ROBERT BROWNING (_Andrea del Sarto_).

Andrea del Sarto says that, but for certain unfortunate
circumstances, he might have reached the high eminence of
Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo. In heaven he
may have another chance to compete with them.

* * * * *

Their noon-day never knows
What names immortal are:
’Tis night alone that shows
How star surpasseth star.

J. B. TABB (_Fame_).

* * * * *

But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Kubla Khan_).

This and the five following quotations and others through the
book are from a small collection of word-pictures, that I had
begun to put together. They are mostly well-known.

* * * * *

Behold the Nereïds under the green sea,
Their wavering limbs borne on the wind-like stream,
Their white arms lifted o’er their streaming hair
With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns,
Hastening to grace their mighty sister’s joy.

SHELLEY (_Prometheus Unbound_).

* * * * *

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square:
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

TENNYSON (_The Princess_).

* * * * *

“But show me the child thou callest mine,
Is she out to-night in the ghost’s sunshine?”

“In St. Peter’s Church she is playing on,
At hide-and-seek, with Apostle John.

When the moonbeams right through the window go,
Where the twelve are standing in glorious show,

She says the rest of them do not stir,
But one comes down to play with her.”

G. MACDONALD (_Phantastes_).

It is a ghost-child who is playing in the great cathedral.

* * * * *

Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtained bed.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (_Goblin Market_).

* * * * *

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn;
The cow’s in the meadow, the sheep in the corn;
Is this the way you mind your sheep,
Under the haycock fast asleep?

_Nursery Rhyme._

Edward Fitzgerald, quoting this in “Euphranor,” says the
“meadow” is the grass reserved for meadowing, or mowing.

* * * * *

THE FEAST OF ADONIS.

_Gorgo._ Is Praxinoë at home?

_Praxinoë._ My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Euno, find a chair—get a cushion for it.

_Gorgo._ It will do beautifully as it is.

_Praxinoë._ Do sit down.

_Gorgo._ Oh, this gad-about spirit! I could hardly get to you, Praxinoë, through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in uniform. And what a journey it is! My dear child, you really live _too_ far off.

_Praxinoë._ It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place—for a house it is not—on purpose that you and I might not be neighbours. He is always just the same—anything to quarrel with one! anything for spite!

_Gorgo._ My dear, don’t talk so of your husband before the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. (_Talking to the child._) Never mind, Zopyrio my pet, she is not talking about papa. (Good heavens, the child does really understand.) Pretty papa!

_Praxinoë._ That “pretty papa” of his the other day (though I told him beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead; stupid, great, big, interminable animal!

_Gorgo._ Mine is just the fellow to him. But never mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear the Queen’s decorations are something splendid.

_Praxinoë._ “In grand people’s houses everything is grand.” What things you have seen in Alexandria! What a deal you will have to tell to anybody who has never been there!

_Gorgo._ Come, we ought to be going.

_Praxinoë._ “Every day is a holiday to people who have nothing to do.” Eunoë, pick up your work; and take care, you lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetch me some water, quick! I wanted the water first, and the girl brings me the soap. Never mind; give it me. Not all that, extravagant! Now pour out the water—stupid! Why don’t you take care of my dress? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased God. Where is the key of the large wardrobe? Bring it here—quick!

_Gorgo._ Praxinoë, you can’t think how well that dress, made full, as you have got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost—the dress by itself, I mean?

_Praxinoë._ Don’t talk of it, Gorgo: more than eight guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it, I have almost worn my life out.

_Gorgo._ Well, you couldn’t have done better.

_Praxinoë._ Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my head—_properly_. No, child (_to her little boy_,) I am not going to take you; there’s a bogey on horseback who bites. Cry as much as you like; I’m not going to have you lamed for life. Now we’ll start. Nurse take the little one and amuse him; call the dog in, and shut the street door. (_They go out._) Good heavens! what a crowd of people! How on earth are we ever to get through all this? They are like ants: you can’t count them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us? Here are the Royal Horse Guards. My good man, don’t ride over me! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright; what a vicious one! Eunoë, you mad girl, do take care!—that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home.

_Gorgo._ All right, Praxinoë, we are safe behind them; and they have gone on to where they are stationed.

_Praxinoë._ Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything else in the world. Let us get on; here’s a great crowd coming this way upon us.

_Gorgo_ (_to an old woman_). Mother, are you from the palace?

_Old woman._ Yes, my dears.

_Gorgo._ Has one a tolerable chance of getting there?

_Old woman._ My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of trying hard; trying will do anything in this world.

_Gorgo._ The old creature has delivered an oracle and disappeared.

_Praxinoë._ Women can tell you everything about everything, even about Jupiter’s marriage with Juno!

_Gorgo._ Look, Praxinoë, what a squeeze at the palace gates.

_Praxinoë._ Tremendous! Take hold of me, Gorgo; and you, Eunoë, take hold of Eutychis!—tight hold, or you’ll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight to us, Eunoë! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Gorgo, there’s my scarf torn right in two. For heaven’s sake, my good man, as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress!

_Stranger._ I’ll do what I can, but it doesn’t depend upon me.

_Praxinoë._ What heaps of people! They push like a drove of pigs.

_Stranger._ Don’t be frightened, ma’am, we are all right.

_Praxinoë._ May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live, for the care you have taken of us! What a kind, considerate man! There is Eunoë jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride.

_Gorgo._ Praxinoë, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is!—how exquisite! Why, the gods might wear it in heaven.

_Praxinoë._ Goddess of Spinning, what hands were hired to do that work? Who designed those beautiful patterns? They seem to stand up and move about, as if they were real—as if they were living things, and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature! And look, look, how charming _he_ lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on his cheeks, that beloved Adonis—Adonis, whom one loves even though he is dead!

_Another stranger._ You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter! Like turtles, you go on for ever.

_Gorgo._ Lord, where does the man come from? What is it to you if we _are_ chatterboxes? Order about your own servants!

_Praxinoë._ Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no more masters than the one we’ve got! We don’t the least care for _you_; pray don’t trouble yourself for nothing.

_Gorgo._ Be quiet, Praxinoë! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman’s daughter, is going to sing the _Adonis_ hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first-rate from _her_. She is going through her airs and graces ready to begin.

THEOCRITUS (_Fifteenth Idyll_).

This is Matthew Arnold’s translation of a _poem_ by Theocritus,
who lived in the Third Century B.C., 2,200 years ago, (see
Arnold’s Essay on _Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment_). I
have altered a few words and also omitted part because of its
length.

Gorgo, a lady of Alexandria, calls on her friend Praxinoë, to
take her to the Festival of Adonis. Greek ladies were allowed
to go out on Festival days if veiled and attended, and,
therefore, Gorgo and Praxinoë take with them their respective
maids, Eutychis and Eunoë, who would no doubt be slave-girls.

Some curious facts may be noted. The wife is kept in seclusion
and the husband does the marketing, buying among other things
her _rouge_. Observe how perfunctory are the pretty lady’s
ablutions (the soap, by the way, is in the form of paste).
The little boy represents the ruling sex and will be removed
at an early age from her control. She is disposed to rebel
against her lord and master, but takes the utmost care of the
important boy-child. While the ladies with their slaves make
up their own dresses, the designs and the finest needlework
are done by men. The Greek woman in Athens was practically
uneducated and regarded as an inferior being; but these ladies
were Dorian Greeks and would no doubt be better treated and
have somewhat more freedom—especially in Alexandria, which was
a colony and, therefore, probably less conservative. Although
no doubt veiled, their eyes would be visible and, as seen in
the East to-day, a pretty woman can always manage to show
her beauty, if she chooses. It will be seen that one man is
polite to the two young, pretty, richly-dressed ladies, and
saves them from being crushed by the crowd, while another is a
crusty, grumpy person, who treats them with some rudeness and,
in the original, ridicules their Dorian pronunciation. Praxinoë
is most grateful to the polite man for what would now be an
ordinary act of courtesy.

As regards the conversation Andrew Lang says: “Nothing can be
more gay and natural than the chatter of the women, which has
changed no more in two thousand years than the song of birds.”

* * * * *

I have seen
A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
Even such a shell the universe itself
Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times,
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.

WORDSWORTH (_The Excursion_).

* * * * *

Marriage is a desperate thing; the Frogs in Aesop were extreme wise: they had a great mind to some Water, but they would not leap into the Well, because they could not get out again.

* * * * *

’Tis reason a Man that will have a Wife should be at the Charge of her Trinkets, and pay all the Scores she sets on him. He that will keep a Monkey, ’tis fit he should pay for the Glasses he breaks.

SELDEN (_Table Talk_).

* * * * *

When you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy said wen he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. _I_ rayther think it isn’t.

CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).

* * * * *

Matrimony is the only game of chance the clergy favour.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

A man, who admires a fine woman, has yet no more reason to wish himself her husband, than one, who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

You wish, Paula, to marry Priscus. I am not surprised;
You are wise; Priscus will not marry you and he is wise.

MARTIAL, IX, 5.

* * * * *

IN THE TWILIGHT.

Men say the sullen instrument,
That, from the Master’s bow,
With pangs of joy or woe,
Feels music’s soul through every fibre sent,
Whispers the ravished strings
More than he knew or meant;
Old summers in its memory glow;
The secrets of the wind it sings;
It hears the April-loosened springs;
And mixes with its mood
All it dreamed when it stood
In the murmurous pine-wood,
Long ago!

The magical moonlight then
Steeped every bough and cone;
The roar of the brook in the glen
Came dim from the distance blown;
The wind through its glooms sang low,
And it swayed to and fro
With delight as it stood
In the wonderful wood,
Long ago!

O my life, have we not had seasons
That only said, Live and rejoice?
That asked not for causes and reasons,
But made us all feeling and voice?
When we went with the winds in their blowing,
When Nature and we were peers,
And we seemed to share in the flowing
Of the inexhaustible years?
Have we not from the earth drawn juices
Too fine for earth’s sordid uses?
Have I heard, have I seen
All I feel and I know?
Doth my heart overween?
Or could it have been
Long ago?

Sometimes a breath floats by me,
An odour from Dreamland sent,
That makes the ghost seem nigh me
Of a splendour that came and went,
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not
In what diviner sphere,
Of memories that stay not and go not,
Like music heard once by an ear
That cannot forget or reclaim it,
A something so shy, it would shame it
To make it a show,
A something too vague, could I name it,
For others to know,
As if I had lived it or dreamed it,
As if I had acted or schemed it,
Long ago!

And yet, could I live it over,
This life that stirs in my brain
Could I be both maiden and lover,
Moon and tide, bee and clover,
As I seem to have been, once again,
Could I but speak and show it,
This pleasure more sharp than pain,
That baffles and lures me so,
The world should not lack a poet,
Such as it had
In the ages glad,
Long ago.

J. R. LOWELL.

* * * * *

I am especially pleased with their _freundin_ (the German word meaning a female friend), which unlike the _amica_ of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now I know it will be said that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny—in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Biographia Literaria_, Letter to a Lady).

Coleridge also says: “The qualities of the sexes correspond.
The man’s courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again
is coveted by the man. His vigorous intellect is answered by
her infallible tact. Can it be true what is so constantly
affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?—I doubt it, I doubt it
exceedingly.”—_Table Talk._

But surely Coleridge might have found the best proof of his
contention in the nature of children, the small boy who fights
with his fists, plays with tin soldiers and despises “girls,”
and the girl-child who loves her doll and her pretty clothes.
See next quotation.

* * * * *

O thou most dear!
Who art thy sex’s complex harmony
God-set more facilely;
To thee may love draw near
Without one blame or fear.
Unchidden save by his humility:
Thou Perseus’ Shield wherein I view secure
The mirrored Woman’s fateful-fair allure!
Whom Heaven still leaves a twofold dignity,
As girlhood gentle, and as boyhood free;
With whom no most diaphanous webs enwind
The barèd limbs of the rebukeless mind.
Wild Dryad, all unconscious of thy tree,
With which indissólubly
The tyrannous time shall one day make thee whole;
Whose frank arms pass unfretted through its bole
Who wear’st thy femineity
Light as entrailèd blossoms, that shalt find
It erelong silver shackles unto thee.
Thou whose young sex is yet but in thy soul;—
As hoarded in the vine
Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine,
As air sleeps, till it toss its limbs in breeze;—
In whom the mystery which lures and sunders;
Grapples and thrusts apart; endears, estranges,
—The dragon to its own Hesperides—
Is gated under slow-revolving changes,
Manifold doors of heavy-hingèd years.
So once, ere Heaven’s eyes were filled with wonders
To see Laughter rise from Tears,
Lay in beauty not yet mighty,
Conchèd in translucencies,
The antenatal Aphodrite,
Caved magically under magic seas;
Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas.

FRANCIS THOMPSON (_Sister Songs_).

Francis Thompson is one of the “difficult” poets who repay
study. Here he says that, in the young girl, sex appears in
a less complex form than in the woman and, just as Perseus
could safely look at the reflection on his shield of the
fatal Medusa’s head, so we can freely view womanhood in the
girl-child. Nothing conceals her open, innocent, feminine
nature. She is the Dryad, the Nymph who lives in the tree and
is born and dies with it, but is as yet unconscious of the
tree, that is, of her sex. Her “young sex is yet but in her
soul,” and is like the juice of the grape which has not yet
fermented into wine, or the calm air which sleeps undisturbed.
The mystery of womanhood, which attracts and yet, in its own
protection, repulses man, will not come to her until after
the changes of years. It is the Aphrodite lying in unawakened
beauty before she rises as a goddess from the sea. (“Facilely”
appears to have the strained meaning “easy to understand” or
“simply”; the word “gated,” “confined,” is a curious use of a
university word: the Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, who
has misbehaved, may be “gated” for a period, _i.e._, confined
to the precincts of his own college.) “The dragon to its
own Hesperides”—the Hesperides were maidens who guarded the
golden apples of love and fruitfulness, which Earth had given
to Hera on her marriage to Zeus. The maidens were protected
by a dragon. Here the dragon is the maiden’s own sensitive
reserve and self-protecting nature, which enable her to protect
herself. (“Conchèd,” Aphrodite is lying in her shell.)

* * * * *

Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer when once we know them.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

Compare the ancient with the modern world; “Look on this picture, and on that.” One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.” In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who besides being virtuous in their actions were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?

SIR J. R. SEELEY (_Ecce Homo_).

The quotation from Hamlet should read, “Look here, upon this
picture, and on this.”

* * * * *

DAY

Waking one morning
In a pleasant land,
By a river flowing
Over golden sand:—

Whence flow ye, waters,
O’er your golden sand?
We come flowing
From the Silent Land.

Whither flow ye, waters,
O’er your golden sand?
We go flowing
To the Silent Land.

And what is this fair realm?
A grain of golden sand
In the great darkness
Of the Silent Land.

JAMES THOMSON (“B.V.”)

* * * * *

For there is not a lie, spite of God’s high decree,
But has made its nest sure on some branch of our tree,
And has some vested right to exist in the land:
And many will have it the tree could not stand,
If the sticks, straws, and feathers, that sheltered the wrong,
Were swept from the boughs they have cumbered so long.

W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).

* * * * *

I shall be old and ugly one day, and I shall look for man’s chivalrous help, but I shall not find it. The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then they fly over them.

OLIVE SCHREINER (_The Story of an African Farm_).

* * * * *

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate “Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”

OLIVE SCHREINER (_The Story of an African Farm_).

* * * * *

Il n’a jamais fait couler larmes à personne sauf à sa mort.

(He never caused any one to shed tears, except at his death.)

_B. Seebohm’s Life of Grellet._

Epitaph on Pétion, President of Hayti about 1816.

* * * * *

... that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).

* * * * *

If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when one is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Romola_—Nello speaking).

George Eliot is quoting the Latin proverb, _Amor tussisque
non celantur_. It is also found in George Herbert’s _Jacula
Prudentum_, 1640. The same proverb appears with all sorts of
variations, “love and a sneeze,” “love and smoke,” “love and
a red nose,” “love and poverty,” etc., being the things that
cannot be hidden. “Love and murder will out” (Congreve, _The
Double Dealer_, Act IV, 2). (I took these instances from some
collection of proverbs.)

* * * * *

We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;—be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour:
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.

WORDSWORTH (_After-Thought_).

* * * * *

You can’t turn curds to milk again,
Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then;
And, having tasted stolen honey,
You can’t buy innocence for money.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Felix Holt_).

* * * * *

The gods are brethren. Wheresoe’er
They set their shrines of love or fear
In Grecian woods, by banks of Nile,
Where cold snows sleep or roses smile,
The gods are brethren. Zeus the Sire
Was fashioned of the self-same fire
As Odin, He, whom Ind brought forth,
Hath his pale kinsman east and north;
And more than one, since life began,
Hath known Christ’s agony for Man.
The gods are brethren. Kin by fate,
In gentleness as well as hate,
’Mid heights that only Thought may climb
They come, they go; they are, or seem;
Each, rainbow’d from the rack of Time,
Casts broken lights across God’s Dream.

R. BUCHANAN (_Balder the Beautiful_).

* * * * *

“You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes,” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth; “it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by his bruising, with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that ’ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at his heels. What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy?”

CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).

Mr. Roker is a turnkey in the Fleet prison.

* * * * *

THE COURTIN’

God makes sech nights, all white an’ still
Fur’z you can look or listen,
Moonshine an’ snow on field an’ hill,
All silence an’ all glisten.

Zekle crep’ up quite unbeknown
An’ peeked in thru’ the winder,
An’ there sot Huldy all alone,
’Ith no one nigh to hender.

A fireplace filled the room’s one side
With half a cord o’ wood in—
There warn’t no stoves (till comfort died)
To bake ye to a puddin’.

The wa’nut logs shot sparkles out
Towards the pootiest, bless her,
An’ leetle flames danced all about
The chiny on the dresser....

The very room, coz she was in,
Seemed warm from floor to ceilin’,
An’ she looked full ez rosy agin
Ez the apples she was peelin’....

He was six foot o’ man, A1,
Clear grit an’ human natur’;
None couldn’t quicker pitch a ton
Nor dror a furrer straighter.

He’d sparked it with full twenty gals,
He’d squired ’em, danced ’em, druv ’em,
Fust this one, an’ then thet, by spells—
All is, he couldn’t love ’em.

But long o’ her his veins ’ould run
All crinkly like curled maple,
The side she breshed felt full o’ sun
Ez a south slope in Ap’il.

She thought no v’ice hed sech a swing
Ez hisn in the choir;
My! when he made Ole Hundred ring,
She _knowed_ the Lord was nigher.

An’ she’d blush scarlit, right in prayer,
When her new meetin’-bunnet
Felt somehow thru’ its crown a pair
O’ blue eyes sot upon it.

Thet night, I tell ye, she looked _some_!
She seemed to ’ve gut a new soul,
For she felt sartin-sure he’d come,
Down to her very shoe-sole.

She heered a foot, an’ knowed it tu,
A-raspin’ on the scraper,—
All ways to once her feelins flew
Like sparks in burnt-up paper.

He kin’ o’ l’itered on the mat,
Some doubtfle o’ the sekle, sequel.
His heart kep’ goin’ pity-pat,
But hern went pity Zekle.

An’ yit she gin her cheer a jerk
Ez though she wished him furder,
An’ on her apples kep’ to work,
Parin’ away like murder.

“You want to see my Pa, I s’pose?”
“Wal ... no ... I come designin’”—
“To see my Ma? She’s sprinklin’ clo’es
Agin to-morrer’s i’nin’.”

To say why gals acts so or so,
Or don’t, ’ould be presumin’;
Mebby to mean _yes_ an’ say _no_
Comes nateral to women.

He stood a spell on one foot fust,
Then stood a spell on t’other,
An’ on which one he felt the wust
He couldn’t ha’ told ye nuther.

Sez he, “I’d better call agin;”
Sez she, “Think likely, Mister;”
Thet last word pricked him like a pin,
An’ ... Wal he up an’ kist her.

When Ma bimeby upon ’em slips,
Huldy sot pale ez ashes,
All kin’ o’ smily roun’ the lips
An’ teary roun’ the lashes....

The blood clost roun’ her heart felt glued
Too tight for all expressin’,
Till mother see how metters stood,
An’ gin ’em both her blessin’.

Then her red come back like the tide,
Down to the Bay o’ Fundy,
An’ all I know is they was cried
In meetin’ come nex’ Sunday.

J. RUSSELL LOWELL

* * * * *

What is the life of man? Is it not to turn from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?

STERNE (_Tristram Shandy_).

* * * * *

I know thy heart by heart.

P. J. BAILEY (_Festus_).

* * * * *

HERBERT SPENCER’S “FIRST PRINCIPLES.”

Mr. Spencer’s genesis of the universe from chaos to the Crimean War ... For our own part, we must confess that this new book of Genesis appears to us no more credible than the old.

J. MARTINEAU (_Science, Nescience, and Faith_).

* * * * *

JAMES MILL.

Did the facts of consciousness stand, as he represents them, his method would work. He satisfactorily explains—the wrong human nature.

J. MARTINEAU (_Essay on John Stuart Mill_).

* * * * *

(Referring to those who insist on the _practical_ as against the _theoretical_.) This solitary term (“practical”) serves a large number of persons as a substitute for all patient and steady thought; and, at all events, instead of meaning that which is useful as opposed to that which is useless, it constantly signifies that of which the use is grossly and immediately palpable, as distinguished from that of which the usefulness can only be discerned after attention and exertion.

SIR HENRY MAINE.

* * * * *

(Men are) dragged along the physiological history, because easy to conceive, and baffled by the spiritual, because it has no pictures to help it.

J. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, I, 100).

* * * * *

As psychology comprises all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient: the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.

ALEXANDER BAIN (1818-1903) (_Contemporary Review_, April 1877).

* * * * *

There is a crude absurd materialism abroad which hasn’t yet learned the fundamental difference between Mind and Matter. It is altogether incomprehensible how any material processes can beget sensations and feelings and thoughts; it is altogether incomprehensible how _you_ arose or _I_ arose. Listen to Spencer:—“Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter alternative would seem the more preferable of the two.... Hence though of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible), yet no translation can carry us beyond our symbols.”

RICHARD HODGSON (_Letter, March 21, 1880_).

* * * * *

_Clown._ What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

_Malvolio._ That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

_Clown._ What thinkest thou of his opinion?

_Malvolio._ I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

_Clown._ Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness.

SHAKESPEARE (_Twelfth Night_, IV, 2).

* * * * *

As the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That, that is, is.”

SHAKESPEARE (_Twelfth Night_, IV, 2).

* * * * *

WHAT IS LOVE?

The passion which unites the sexes ... is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are, first, those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty.... With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection—a sentiment which, as it can exist between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment.... Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence.... There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired above all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience.... Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the _amour propre_. Yet again, the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there is the pleasure of possession—the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action. Towards other persons a restrained behaviour is requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed—an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another’s sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling, forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call Love.

HERBERT SPENCER (_Principles of Psychology_, 3rd Ed., Vol. I, 487).

The heading is, of course, mine—not Spencer’s.

* * * * *

WHAT AM I?

The aggregate of feelings and ideas, constituting the mental _I_, have not in themselves the principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; but the _I_ which continuously survives as the subject of these changing states is that portion of the Unknowable Power, which is statically conditioned in (my particular one of those) special nervous structures pervaded by a dynamically-conditioned portion of the Unknowable Power called energy.

HERBERT SPENCER (_Principles of Psychology_, 3rd Ed., Vol. II, 504).

The heading and words in brackets are mine. As the reader may
at any time be asked “What are you?” it would be well to be
ready with a simple reply.

* * * * *

New truths, old truths! sirs, there is nothing new possible to be revealed to us in the moral world; we know all we shall ever know: and it is for simply reminding us, by their various respective expedients, how we do know this and the other matter, that men get called prophets, poets, and the like. A philosopher’s life is spent in discovering that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard-thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others: and so he restates it, to the confusion of somebody else in good time. As for adding to the original stock of truths,—impossible!

R. BROWNING (_A Soul’s Tragedy_).

* * * * *

When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, ’twas no matter what he said.

BYRON (_Don Juan, Canto XI_).

* * * * *

The law of equal freedom which Herbert Spencer deduces is binding only upon those who admit both that human happiness is the Divine Will and that we should act in accordance with the Divine Will. Why should I obey this law? Because without such obedience human happiness cannot be complete. Why should I aim at human happiness? Because human happiness is the Divine Will. The inexorable _why_ pursues us here—Why should I aim at the fulfilment of the Divine Will? To this question there seems no satisfactory reply but that it is for my own happiness to do so.

RICHARD HODGSON (_Unpublished Essay_, 1879).

* * * * *

I have no ambition to wander into the inane and usurp the sceptre of the dim Hegel, situated Nowhere, with pure Nothing behind him, and pure Being before him, steadfastly and vainly endeavouring with his _Werden_ to stop the sand-flowing of smiling Time.

RICHARD HODGSON (_Early Unpublished Essay_).

_Werden_ in Hegel is usually translated “Becoming.” To Hegel
the truth of the world is found in life or movement, not in
Being which is changeless, but tells and does nothing.

* * * * *

Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Arnold was with Herbert Spencer on a Nile steamer. Spencer was dyspeptic and irritable; Arnold was a nocturnal bird, pacing the deck alone in a long gown and smoking a long pipe. Suddenly appeared a white figure, Spencer in his night-shirt, who in the bad light took Arnold for a sailor (and Arnold did not undeceive him).

“Hi! there!”

“Ay, ay, Sir.”

“What are the men making that noise there forward for?”

“Cleaning the engines, Sir.”

“Just tell them not to make such a row, keeping good Christians from their sleep at this time of night.”

“Ay, ay, Sir.”

(Disappearance of ghost; joke next morning,)

(_Told by Arnold to Hodgson, June, 1884_).

The great agnostic, usually most precise in his language,
describes himself as a “good Christian”!

* * * * *

The very law which moulds a tear
And bids it trickle from its source,—
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.

SAMUEL ROGERS (_On a Tear_).

* * * * *

WILLIAM BLAKE.

He came to the desert of London town
Grey miles long;
He wander’d up and he wander’d down,
Singing a quiet song,

He came to the desert of London Town,
Mirk miles broad;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Ever alone with God.

There were thousands and thousands of human kind
In this desert of brick and stone:
But some were deaf and some were blind,
And he was there alone.

At length the good hour came; he died
As he had lived, alone:
He was not miss’d from the desert wide,—
Perhaps he was found at the Throne.

JAMES THOMSON (“B.V.”).

_The desert of London town_—_Magna civitas, magna solitudo_: “a
great city is a great solitude.”

It is strange to think that these verses (and especially the
last verse) were written by the pessimist who wrote in all
sincerity the terrible lines in Pt. VIII of “The City of
Dreadful Night.”

* * * * *

Farewell, green fields and happy grove,
Where flocks have ta’en delight;
Where lambs have nibbled, silent move
The feet of angels bright;
Unseen, they pour blessing
And joy without ceasing,
On each bud and blossom,
And each sleeping bosom.

They look in every thoughtless nest,
Where birds are covered warm;
They visit caves of every beast,
To keep them all from harm:
If they see any weeping
That should have been sleeping,
They pour sleep on their head,
And sit down by their bed.

When wolves and tigers howl for prey,
They pitying stand and weep;
Seeking to drive their thirst away,
And keep them from the sheep,
But if they rush dreadful,
The angels, most heedful,
Receive each mild spirit,
New worlds to inherit.

WILLIAM BLAKE (_Night_).

* * * * *

Sic vos non vobis nidificatis, aves,
Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis, oves,
Sic vos non vobis mellificatis, apes,
Sic vos non vobis fertis aratra, boves.

(So you, birds, build nests—not for yourselves,
So you, sheep, grow fleeces—not for yourselves,
So you, bees, make honey—not for yourselves,
So you, oxen, draw the plough—not for yourselves.)

VIRGIL.

According to Donatus, Virgil wrote a couplet in praise of
Cæsar and posted it anonymously on the portals of the palace
(31 B.C.). Bathyllus gave himself out as the author of this
couplet, and on that account received a present from Cæsar.
Next night _Sic vos non vobis_ (“So you not for you”) was found
written four times in the same place. The Romans were puzzled
as to what was meant by these words, until Virgil came forward
and completed the verse—adding a preliminary line, _Hos ego
versiculos feci, tulit alter honores_, “I wrote the lines,
another wears the bays.”

Shelley in _Song to the Men of England_ wrote as a socialist:

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

In previous verses he refers to bees, and, of course, the above
quotation was in his mind.

* * * * *

I know, of late experience taught, that him
Who is my foe I must but hate as one
Whom I may yet call Friend: and him who loves me
Will I but serve and cherish as a man
Whose love is not abiding. Few be they
Who, reaching friendship’s port, have there found rest.

SOPHOCLES (_Ajax_).

This is from C. S. Calverley’s fine translation of the speech
of Ajax.

* * * * *

A maiden’s heart is as champagne, ever aspiring and struggling upwards,
And it needeth that its motions be checked by the silvered cork of
Propriety:
He that can afford the price, his be the precious treasure,
Let him drink deeply of its sweetness, nor grumble if it tasteth of the
cork.