Chapter VI: Part 6

We once thought of going ourselves to the English Bar, but were dissuaded from doing so by some judicious friends, who assured us we should only be throwing away our great talents and unexampled eloquence; for that success depended solely on interest, and we had none we knew of, either in high places or in low, and had then never seen an attorney. We wept for the fate of many dear friends in wigs, and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On our return from Palestine and other foreign parts, behold them all bending under briefs, bound by retaining fees, or, like game-hawks, wheeling in airy circuits over the rural provinces, and pouncing down on their prey, away to their eyries with talonfuls, which they devoured at their luxurious leisure, untroubled by any callow young! They now compose the Bench.

Ere we set off for Salem, we had thoughts of entering the Church, and of becoming Bishops. But it was necessary, we were told, first to be tutor to a lord. That, in our pride, we could not stomach; but if ours had not been the sin by which Satan fell, where now had been the excellent Howley? All our habits in youth led us to associate much with intending divines. A few of them are still curates; but 'twere vain to try to count the vicars, rectors, canons, deans, archdeacons, and bishops, with whom, when we were all undergraduates together at Oxford, we used to do nothing but read Greek all day, and Latin all night. Yet you hear nothing but abuse of such a Church! and are told to look at the Dissenters. We do look at them, and an uglier set we never saw; not one in a hundred, in his grimness, a gentleman. Not a single scholar have they got to show; and now that Hall is mute, not one orator. Their divinity is of the dust--and their discourses dry bones. Down with the old Universities--up with new. The old are not yet down, but the new are up; and how dazzling the contrast, even to the purblind! You may hew down trees, but not towers; and Granta and Rhedicyna will show their temples to the sun, ages after such structures shall have become hospitals. They enlighten the land. Beloved are they by all the gentlemen of England. Even the plucked think of them with tears of filial reverence, and having renewed their plumage, clap their wings, and crow defiance to all their foes. A man, you say, can get there no education to fit him for life. Bah! Tell that to the marines. Now and then one meets a man eminent in a liberal profession, who has not been at any place that could easily be called a College. But the great streams of talent in England keep perpetually flowing from the gates of her glorious Universities--and he who would deny it in any mixed company of leading men in London, would only have to open his eyes in the hush that rebuked his folly, to see that he was a Cockney, clever enough, perhaps, in his own small way, and the author of some sonnets, but even to his own feelings painfully out of place among men who had not studied at the Surrey.

We cannot say that we have any fears, this fine clear September morning, for the Church of England in England. In Ireland, deserted and betrayed, it has received a dilapidating shock. Fain would seven millions of "the finest people on the earth," and likewise the most infatuated, who are so proud of the verdure of their isle that they love to make "the green one red," see the entire edifice overthrown, not one stone left upon another, and its very name smothered in a smoky cloud of ascending dust. They have told us so in yells, over which has still been heard "the wolf's long howl," the savage cry of the O'Connell. And Ministers who pretend to be Protestants, and in reform have not yet declared against the Reformation, have tamely yielded, recreants from the truth, to brawlers who would pull down her holiest altars, and given up "pure religion, breathing household laws," a sacrifice to superstition. But there is a power enshrined in England which no Government dare seek to desecrate--in the hearts of the good and wise, grateful to an establishment that has guarded Christianity from corruption, and is venerated by all the most enlightened spirits who conscientiously worship without its pale, and know that in the peaceful shadow of its strength repose their own humbler and untroubled altars.

We have been taking a cheerful--a hopeful view of our surrounding world, as it is enclosed within these our seas, whose ideal murmur seemed a while to breathe in unison with our Monologue. We have been believing that in this our native land, the road of merit is the road to success--say happiness. And is not the law the same in the world of Literature and the Fine Arts? Give a great genius anything like fair play, and he will gain glory--nay, bread. True, he may be before his age, and may have to create his worshippers. But how few such! And is it a disgrace to an age to produce a genius whose grandeur it cannot all at once comprehend? The works of genius are surely not often incomprehensible to the highest contemporary minds, and if they win their admiration, pity not the poor Poet. But pray syllable the living Poet's name who has had reason to complain of having fallen on evil days, or who is with "darkness and with danger compassed round." From humblest birthplaces in the obscurest nooks frequently have we seen

"The fulgent head
Star-bright appear;"

from unsuspected rest among the water-lilies of the mountain mere, the snow-white swan in full plumage soar into the sky. Hush! no nonsense about Wordsworth. "Far-off his coming shone;" and what if for a while men knew not whether 'twas some mirage-glimmer, or the dawning of a new "orb of song!"

We have heard rather too much even from that great poet about the deafness and blindness of the present time. No Time but the future, he avers, has ears or eyes for divine music and light. Was Homer in his own day obscure, or Shakespeare? But Heaven forbid we should force the bard into an argument; we allow him to sit undisturbed by us in the bower nature delighted to build for him, with small help from his own hands, at the dim end of that alley green, among lake-murmur and mountain-shadow, for ever haunted by ennobling visions. But we love and respect Present Time--partly, we confess, because he has shown some little kindly feeling for ourselves, whereas we fear Future Time may forget us among many others of his worthy father's friends, and the name of Christopher North

"Die on his ears a faint unheeded sound."

But Present Time has not been unjust to William Wordsworth. Some small temporalities were so; imps running about the feet of Present Time, and sometimes making him stumble: but on raising his eyes from the ground, he saw something shining like an Apparition on the mountain-top, and he hailed, and with a friendly voice, the advent of another true Poet of nature and of man.

We must know how to read that prophet, before we preach from any text in his book of revelations.

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness."

Why spoke he thus? Because a deep darkness had fallen upon him all alone in a mountain-cave, and he quaked before the mystery of man's troubled life.

"He thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perish'd in his pride;
Of him who walk'd in glory and in joy,
Following his plough upon the mountain-side!"

and if they died miserably, "How may I perish!" But they wanted wisdom. Therefore the marvellous boy drank one bowl drugged with sudden, and the glorious ploughman many bowls drugged with lingering death. If we must weep over the woes of Genius, let us know for whom we may rightly shed our tears. With one drop of ink you may write the names of all

"The mighty Poets in their misery dead."

Wordsworth wrote those lines, as we said, in the inspiration of a profound but not permanent melancholy; and they must not be profaned by being used as a quotation in defence of accusations against human society, which, in some lips, become accusations against Providence. The mighty Poets have been not only wiser but happier than they knew; and what glory from heaven and earth was poured over their inward life, up to the very moment it darkened away into the gloom of the grave!

Many a sad and serious hour have we read d'Israeli, and many a lesson may all lovers of literature learn from his well-instructed books. But from the unhappy stories therein so feelingly and eloquently narrated, has many "a famous ape" drawn conclusions the very reverse of those which he himself leaves to be drawn by all minds possessed of any philosophy. Melancholy the moral of these moving tales; but we must look for it, not into the society that surrounds us, though on it too we must keep a watchful, and, in spite of all its sins, a not irreverent eye, but into our own hearts. There lies the source of evil which some evil power perhaps without us stirs up till it wells over in misery. Then fiercely turns the wretch first against "the world and the world's law," both sometimes iniquitous, and last of all against the rebellious spirit in his own breast, but for whose own innate corruption his moral being would have been victorious against all outward assaults, violent or insidious, "and to the end persisting safe arrived."

Many men of genius have died without their fame, and for their fate we may surely mourn without calumniating our kind. It was their lot to die. Such was the will of God. Many such have come and gone, ere they knew themselves what they were; their brothers and sisters and friends knew it not; knew it not their fathers and their mothers; nor the village maidens on whose bosoms they laid their dying heads. Many, conscious of the divine flame, and visited by mysterious stirrings that would not let them rest, have like vernal wildflowers withered, or been cut down like young trees in the season of leaf and blossom. Of this our mortal life what are these but beautiful evanishings! Such was our young Scottish Poet, Michael Bruce--a fine scholar, who taught a little wayside school, and died, a mere lad, of consumption. Loch Leven Castle, where Mary Stuart was imprisoned, looks not more melancholy among the dim waters for her than for its own Poet's sake! The linnet, in its joy among the yellow broom, sings not more sweetly than did he in his sadness, sitting beside his unopened grave, "one song that will not die," though the dirge but draw now and then a tear from some simple heart.

"Now spring returns--but not to me returns
The vernal joy my better years have known;
Dim in my breast life's dying taper burns,
And all the joys of life with health are flown."

To young Genius to die is often a great gain. The green leaf was almost hidden in blossoms, and the tree put forth beautiful promise. Cold winds blew, and clouds intercepted the sunshine; but it felt the dews of heaven, and kept flourishing fair even in the moonlight, deriving sweet sustenance from the stars. But would all those blossoms have been fruit? Many would have formed, but more perhaps dropt in unperceived decay, and the tree which "all eyes that looked on loved," might not have been the pride of the garden. Death could not permit the chance of such disappointment, stepped kindly in, and left the spring-dream "sweet but mournful to the soul," among its half-fancied memories. Such was the fate, perhaps, of Henry Kirke White. His fine moral and intellectual being was not left to pine away neglected; and if, in gratitude and ambition, twin-births in that noble heart, he laid down his life for sake of the lore he loved, let us lament the dead with no passionate ejaculations over injustice by none committed, console ourselves with the thought, in noways unkind to his merits, that he died in a mild bright spring that might have been succeeded by no very glorious summer; and that, fading away as he did among the tears of the good and great, his memory has been embalmed, not only in his own gentle inspirations, but in the immortal eulogy of Southey. But, alas! many thus endowed by nature "have waged with fortune an unequal war;" and pining away in poverty and disappointment, have died broken-hearted--and been buried--some in unhonoured, some even in unwept graves! And how many have had a far more dismal lot, because their life was not so innocent! The children of misfortune, but of error too--of frailty, vice, and sin. Once gone astray, with much to tempt them on, and no voice, no hand, to draw them back, theirs has been at first a flowery descent to death, but soon sorely beset with thorns, lacerating the friendless wretches, till, with shame and remorse their sole attendants, they have tottered into uncoffined holes and found peace.

With sorrows and sufferings like these, it would be hardly fair to blame society at large for having little or no sympathy; for they are, in the most affecting cases, borne in silence, and are unknown even to the generous and humane in their own neighbourhood, who might have done something or much to afford encouragement or relief. Nor has Charity always neglected those who so well deserved her open hand, and in their virtuous poverty might, without abatement of honourable pride in themselves, have accepted silent succour to silent distress. Pity that her blessings should be so often intercepted by worthless applicants, on their way, it may be said, to the magnanimous who have not applied at all, but spoken to her heart in a silent language, which was not meant even to express the penury it betrayed. But we shall never believe that dew twice blessed seldom descends, in such a land as ours, on the noble young head that else had sunk like a chance flower in some dank shade, left to wither among weeds. We almost venture to say, that much of such unpitied, because often unsuspected suffering, cannot cease to be without a change in the moral government of the world.

Nor has Genius a right to claim from Conscience what is due but to Virtue. None who love humanity can wish to speak harshly of its mere frailties or errors--but none who revere morality can allow privilege to its sins. All who sin suffer, with or without genius; and we are nowhere taught in the New Testament, that remorse in its agony, and penitence in its sorrow, visit men's imaginations only; but whatever way they enter, their rueful dwelling is in the heart. Poets shed no bitterer tears than ordinary men; and Fonblanque finely showed us, in one of his late little essays, clear as wells and deep as tarns, that so far from there being anything in the constitution of genius naturally kindred either to vice or misery, it is framed of light and love and happiness, and that its sins and sufferings come not from the spirit but from the flesh. Yet is its flesh as firm as, and perhaps somewhat finer than, that of the common clay; but still it is clay--for all men are dust.

But what if they who, on the ground of genius, claim exemption from our blame, and inclusion within our sympathies, even when seen suffering from their own sins, have no genius at all, but are mere ordinary men, and but for the fumes of some physical excitement, which they mistake for the airs of inspiration, are absolutely stupider than people generally go, and even without any tolerable abilities for alphabetical education? Many such run versifying about, and will not try to settle down into any easy sedentary trade, till, getting thirsty through perpetual perspiration, they take to drinking, come to you with subscription-papers for poetry, with a cock in their eye that tells of low tippling-houses, and, accepting your half-crown, slander you when melting it in the purling purlieus of their own donkey-browsed Parnassus.

Can this age be fairly charged--we speak of England and Scotland--with a shameful indifference--or worse--a cruel scorn--or worse still--a barbarous persecution of young persons of humble birth, in whom there may appear a promise of talent, or of genius? Many are the scholars in whom their early benefactors have had reason to be proud of themselves, while they have been happy to send their sons to be instructed in the noblest lore, by men whose boyhood they had rescued from the darkness of despair, and clothed it with the warmth and light of hope. And were we to speak of endowments in schools and colleges, in which so many fine scholars have been brought up from among the humbler classes, who but for them had been bred to some mean handicraft, we should show better reason still for believing that moral and intellectual worth is not overlooked, or left to pine neglected in obscure places, as it is too much the fashion with a certain set of discontented declaimers to give out; but that in no other country has such provision been made for the meritorious children of the enlightened poor as in England. But we fear that the talent and the genius which, according to them, have been so often left or sent to beggary, to the great reproach even of our national character, have not been of a kind which a thoughtful humanity would in its benefactions have recognised; for it looks not with very hopeful eyes on mere irregular sallies of fancy, least of all when spurning prudence and propriety, and symptomatic of a mental constitution easily excited, but averse to labour, and insensible to the delight labour brings with it, when the faculties are all devoted in steadfastness of purpose to the acquisition of knowledge and the attainment of truth.

'Tis not easy to know, seeing it is so difficult to define it, whether this or that youth who thinks he has genius, has it or not: the only proof he may have given of it is perhaps a few copies of verses, which breathe the animal gladness of young life, and are tinged with tints of the beautiful, which joy itself, more imaginative than it ever again will be, steals from the sunset; but sound sense, and judgment, and taste which is sense and judgment of all finest feelings and thoughts, and the love of light dawning on the intellect, and ability to gather into knowledge facts near and from afar, till the mind sees systems, and in them understands the phenomena which, when looked at singly, perplexed the pleasure of the sight--these, and aptitudes and capacities and powers such as these, are indeed of promise, and more than promise; they are already performance, and justify in minds thus gifted, and in those who watch their workings, hopes of a wiser and happier future when the boy shall be a man.

Perhaps too much honour, rather than too little, has been shown by this age to mediocre poetry and other works of fiction. A few gleams of genius have given some writers of little worth a considerable reputation; and great waxed the pride of poetasters. But true poetry burst in beauty over the land, and we became intolerant of "false glitter." Fresh sprang its flowers from the "daedal earth," or seemed, they were so surpassingly beautiful, as if spring had indeed descended from heaven, "veiled in a shower of shadowing roses," and no longer could we suffer young gentlemen and ladies, treading among the profusion, to gather the glorious scatterings, and weaving them into fantastic or even tasteful garlands, to present them to us, as if they had been raised from the seed of their own genius, and entitled therefore "to bear their name in the wild woods." This flower-gathering, pretty pastime though it be, and altogether innocent, fell into disrepute; and then all such florists began to complain of being neglected, or despised, or persecuted, and their friends to lament over their fate, the fate of all genius, "in amorous ditties all a summer's day."

Besides the living poets of highest rank, are there not many whose claims to join the sacred band have been allowed, because their lips, too, have sometimes been touched with a fire from heaven? Second-rate indeed! Ay, well for those who are third, fourth, or fifth rate--knowing where sit Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Round about Parnassus run _many_ parallel roads, with forests of "cedar and branching palm" between, overshadowing the sunshine on each magnificent level with a sense of something more sublime still nearer the forked summit; and each band, so that they be not ambitious overmuch, in their own region may wander or repose in grateful bliss. Thousands look up with envy from "the low-lying fields of the beautiful land" immediately without the line that goes wavingly asweep round the base of the holy mountain, separating it from the common earth. What clamour and what din from the excluded crowd! Many are heard there to whom nature has been kind, but they have not yet learned "to know themselves," or they would retire, but not afar off, and in silence adore. And so they do ere long, and are happy in the sight of "the beauty still more beauteous" revealed to their fine perceptions, though to them was not given the faculty that by combining in spiritual passion creates. But what has thither brought the self-deceived, who will not be convinced of their delusion, even were Homer or Milton's very self to frown on them with eyes no longer dim, but angry in their brightness like lowering stars?

But we must beware--perhaps too late--of growing unintelligible, and ask you, in plainer terms, if you do not think that by far the greatest number of all those who raise an outcry against the injustice of the world to men of genius, are persons of the meanest abilities, who have all their lives been foolishly fighting with their stars? Their demons have not whispered to them "have a taste," but "you have genius," and the world gives the demons the lie. Thence anger, spite, rancour, and envy eat their hearts, and they "rail against the Lord's anointed." They set up idols of clay, and fall down and worship them--or idols of brass, more worthless than clay; or they perversely, and in hatred, not in love, pretend reverence for the Fair and Good, because, forsooth, placed by man's ingratitude too far in the shade, whereas man's pity has, in deep compassion, removed the objects of their love, because of their imperfections not blameless, back in among that veiling shade, that their beauty might still be visible while their deformities were hidden in "a dim religious light."

Let none of the sons or daughters of genius hearken to such outcry but with contempt--and at all times with suspicion, when they find themselves the objects of such lamentations. The world is not--at least does not wish to be an unkind, ungenerous, and unjust world. Many who think themselves neglected, are far more thought of than they suppose; just as many who imagine the world ringing with their name, are in the world's ears nearly anonymous. Only one edition or two of your poems have sold--but is it not pretty well that five hundred or a thousand copies have been read, or glanced over, or looked at, or skimmed, or skipped, or fondled, or petted, or tossed aside "between malice and true love," by ten times that number of your fellow-creatures, not one of whom ever saw your face; while many millions of men, nearly your equals, and not a few millions your superiors far, have contentedly dropt into the grave, at the close of a long life, without having once "invoked the Muse," and who would have laughed in your face had you talked to them, even in their greatest glee, about their genius?

There is a glen in the Highlands (dearly beloved Southrons, call on us, on your way through Edinburgh, and we shall delight to instruct you how to walk our mountains) called Glencro--very unlike Glenco. A good road winds up the steep ascent, and at the summit there is a stone seat on which you read "_Rest and be thankful_." You do so--and are not a little proud--if pedestrians--of your achievement. Looking up, you see cliffs high above your head (not the Cobbler), and in the clear sky, as far above them, a balanced bird. You envy him his seemingly motionless wings, and wonder at his air-supporters. Down he darts, or aside he shoots, or right up he soars, and you wish you were an Eagle. You have reached Rest-and-be-thankful, yet rest you will not, and thankful you will not be, and you scorn the mean inscription, which many a worthier wayfarer has blessed, while sitting on that stone he has said, "give us this day our daily bread," eat his crust, and then walked away contented down to Cairndow. Just so has it been with you sitting at your appointed place--pretty high up--on the road to the summit of the Biforked Hill. You look up and see Byron--there "sitting where you may not soar,"--and wish you were a great Poet. But you are no more a great Poet than an Eagle eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip--and will not rest-and-be-thankful that you are a man and a Christian. Nay, you are more, an author of no mean repute; and your prose is allowed to be excellent, better far than the best paragraph in this our Morning Monologue. But you are sick of walking, and nothing will satisfy you but to fly. Be contented, as we are, with feet, and weep not for wings; and let us take comfort together from a cheering quotation from the philosophic Gray--

"For they that creep and they that fly,
Just end where they began!"

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.

A May-morning on Ulswater and the banks of Ulswater--commingled earth and heaven! Spring is many-coloured as Autumn; but now Joy scatters the hues daily brightening into greener life, then Melancholy dropt them daily dimming into yellower death. The fear of Winter then--but now the hope of Summer; and Nature rings with hymns hailing the visible advent of the perfect year. If for a moment the woods are silent, it is but to burst forth anew into louder song. The rain is over and gone--but the showery sky speaks in the streams on a hundred hills; and the wide mountain gloom opens its heart to the sunshine that on many a dripping precipice burns like fire. Nothing seems inanimate. The very clouds and their shadows look alive--the trees, never dead, are wide-awakened from their sleep--families of flowers are frequenting all the dewy places--old walls are splendid with the light of lichens--and birch-crowned cliffs up among the coves send down their fine fragrance to the Lake on every bolder breath that whitens with breaking wavelets the blue of its breezy bosom. Nor mute the voice of man. The shepherd is whooping on the hill--the ploughman calling to his team somewhere among the furrows in some small late field, won from the woods; and you hear the laughter, and the echoes of the laughter--one sound--of children busied in half-work half-play; for what else in vernal sunshine is the occupation of young rustic life? 'Tis no Arcadia--no golden age. But a lovelier scene--in the midst of all its grandeur--is not in merry and majestic England; nor did the hills of this earth ever circumscribe a pleasanter dwelling for a nobler peasantry, than these Cumbrian ranges of rocks and pastures, where the raven croaks in his own region, unregarded in theirs by the fleecy flocks. How beautiful the Church Tower!

On a knoll not far from the shore, and not high above the water, yet by an especial felicity of place gently commanding all that reach of the Lake with all its ranges of mountains--every single tree, every grove, and all the woods seeming to show or to conceal the scene at the bidding of the Spirit of Beauty--reclined two Figures--the one almost rustic, but venerable in the simplicity of old age--the other no longer young, but still in the prime of life--and though plainly apparelled, with form and bearing such as are pointed out in cities, because belonging to distinguished men. The old man behaved towards him with deference, but not humility; and between them two--in many things unlike--it was clear even from their silence that there was friendship.

A little way off, and sometimes almost running, now up and now down the slopes and hollows, was a girl about eight years old--whether beautiful or not you could not know, for her face was either half-hidden in golden hair, or when she tossed the tresses from her brow, it was so bright in the sunshine that you saw no features, only a gleam of joy. Now she was chasing the butterflies, not to hurt them, but to get a nearer sight of their delicate gauze wings--the first that had come--she wondered whence--to waver and wanton for a little while in the spring sunshine, and then, she felt, as wondrously, one and all, as by consent, to vanish. And now she stooped as if to pull some little wildflower, her hand for a moment withheld by a loving sense of its loveliness, but ever and anon adding some new colour to the blended bloom intended to gladden her father's eyes--though the happy child knew full well, and sometimes wept to know, that she herself had his entire heart. Yet gliding, or tripping, or dancing along, she touched not with fairy foot one white clover-flower on which she saw working the silent bee. Her father looked too often sad, and she feared--though what it was, she imagined not even in dreams--that some great misery must have befallen him before they came to live in the glen. And such, too, she had heard from a chance whisper, was the belief of their neighbours. But momentary the shadows on the light of childhood! Nor was she insensible to her own beauty, that with the innocence it enshrined combined to make her happy; and first met her own eyes every morning, when most beautiful, awakening from the hushed awe of her prayers. She was clad in russet like a cottager's child; but her air spoke of finer breeding than may be met with among those mountains--though natural grace accompanies there many a maiden going with her pitcher to the well--and gentle blood and old flows there in the veins of now humble men--who, but for the decay of families once high, might have lived in halls, now dilapidated, and scarcely distinguished through masses of ivy from the circumjacent rocks!

The child stole close behind her father, and kissing his cheek, said, "Were there ever such lovely flowers seen in Ulswater before, father? I do not believe that they will ever die." And she put them in his breast. Not a smile came to his countenance--no look of love--no faint recognition--no gratitude for the gift which at other times might haply have drawn a tear. She stood abashed in the sternness of his eyes, which, though fixed on her, seemed to see her not; and feeling that her glee was mistimed--for with such gloom she was not unfamiliar--the child felt as if her own happiness had been sin, and, retiring into a glade among the broom, sat down and wept.

"Poor wretch, better far that she never had been born."

The old man looked on his friend with compassion, but with no surprise; and only said, "God will dry up her tears."

These few simple words, uttered in a solemn voice, but without one tone of reproach, seemed somewhat to calm the other's trouble, who first looking towards the spot where his child was sobbing to herself, though he heard it not, and then looking up to heaven, ejaculated for her sake a broken prayer. He then would have fain called her to him; but he was ashamed that even she should see him in such a passion of grief--and the old man went to her of his own accord, and bade her, as from her father, again to take her pastime among the flowers. Soon was she dancing in her happiness as before; and, that her father might hear she was obeying him, singing a song.

"For five years every Sabbath have I attended divine service in your chapel--yet dare I not call myself a Christian. I have prayed for faith--nor, wretch that I am, am I an unbeliever. But I fear to fling myself at the foot of the cross. God be merciful to me a sinner!"

The old man opened not his lips; for he felt that there was about to be made some confession. Yet he doubted not that the sufferer had been more sinned against than sinning; for the goodness of the stranger--so called still after five years' residence among the mountains--was known in many a vale--and the Pastor knew that charity covereth a multitude of sins--and even as a moral virtue prepares the heart for heaven. So sacred a thing is solace in this woeful world.

"We have walked together, many hundred times, for great part of a day, by ourselves two, over long tracts of uninhabited moors, and yet never once from my lips escaped one word about my fates or fortunes--so frozen was the secret in my heart. Often have I heard the sound of your voice, as if it were that of the idle wind; and often the words I did hear seemed, in the confusion, to have no relation to us, to be strange syllablings in the wilderness, as from the hauntings of some evil spirit instigating me to self-destruction."

"I saw that your life was oppressed by some perpetual burden; but God darkened not your mind while your heart was disturbed so grievously; and well pleased were we all to think, that in caring so kindly for the griefs of others, you might come at last to forget your own; or if that were impossible, to feel, that with the alleviations of time, and sympathy, and religion, yours was no more than the common lot of sorrow."

They rose--and continued to walk in silence--but not apart--up and down that small sylvan enclosure overlooked but by rocks. The child saw her father's distraction--no unusual sight to her; yet on each recurrence as mournful and full of fear as if seen for the first time--and pretended to be playing aloof with her face pale in tears.

"That child's mother is not dead. Where she is now I know not--perhaps in a foreign country hiding her guilt and her shame. All say that a lovelier child was never seen than that wretch--God bless her--how beautiful is the poor creature now in her happiness singing over her flowers! Just such another must her mother have been at her age. She is now an outcast--and an adulteress."

The Pastor turned away his face, for in the silence he heard groans, and the hollow voice again spoke.--

"Through many dismal days and nights have I striven to forgive her, but never for many hours together have I been enabled to repent my curse. For on my knees I implored God to curse her--her head--her eyes--her breast--her body--mind, heart, and soul--and that she might go down a loathsome leper to the grave."

"Remember what He said to the woman--'Go, and sin no more!'"

"The words have haunted me all up and down the hills--His words and mine; but mine have always sounded liker justice at last--for my nature was created human--and human are all the passions that pronounced that holy or unholy curse!"

"Yet you would not curse her now--were she lying here at your feet--or if you were standing by her deathbed?"

"Lying here at my feet! Even here--on this very spot--not blasted, but green through all the year--within the shelter of these two rocks--she did lie at my feet in her beauty--and as I thought her innocence--my own happy bride! Hither I brought her to be blest--and blest I was even up to the measure of my misery. This world is hell to me now--but then it was heaven!"

"These awful names are of the mysteries beyond the grave."

"Hear me and judge. She was an orphan; all her father's and mother's relations were dead, but a few who were very poor. I married her, and secured her life against this heartless and wicked world. That child was born--and while it grew like a flower--she left it--and its father--me who loved her beyond light and life, and would have given up both for her sake."

"And have not yet found heart to forgive her--miserable as she needs must be--seeing she has been a great sinner!"

"Who forgives? The father his profligate son, or disobedient daughter? No; he disinherits his firstborn, and suffers him to perish, perhaps by an ignominious death. He leaves his only daughter to drag out her days in penury--a widow with orphans. The world may condemn, but is silent; he goes to church every Sabbath, but no preacher denounces punishment on the unrelenting, the unforgiving parent. Yet how easily might he have taken them both back to his heart, and loved them better than ever! But she poisoned my cup of life when it seemed to overflow with heaven. Had God dashed it from my lips, I could have borne my doom. But with her own hand which I had clasped at the altar--and with our Lucy at her knees--she gave me that loathsome draught of shame and sorrow:--I drank it to the dregs--and it is burning all through my being--now--as if it had been hell-fire from the hands of a fiend in the shape of an angel. In what page of the New Testament am I told to forgive her? Let me see the verse--and then shall I know that Christianity is an imposture; for the voice of God within me--the conscience which is His still small voice--commands me never from my memory to obliterate that curse--never to forgive her, and her wickedness--not even if we should see each other's shadows in a future state, after the day of judgment."

His countenance grew ghastly--and staggering to a stone, he sat down and eyed the skies with a vacant stare, like a man whom dreams carry about in his sleep. His face was like ashes--and he gasped like one about to fall into a fit. "Bring me water"--and the old man motioned on the child, who, giving ear to him for a moment, flew away to the Lakeside with an urn she had brought with her for flowers; and held it to her father's lips. His eyes saw it not;--there was her sweet pale face all wet with tears, almost touching his own--her innocent mouth breathing that pure balm that seems to a father's soul to be inhaled from the bowers of paradise. He took her into his bosom--and kissed her dewy eyes--and begged her to cease her sobbing--to smile--to laugh--to sing--to dance away into the sunshine--_to be happy!_ And Lucy afraid, not of her father, but of his kindness--for the simple creature was not able to understand his wild utterance of blessings--returned to the glade but not to her pastime, and couching like a fawn among the fern, kept her eyes on her father, and left her flowers to fade unheeded beside her empty urn.

"Unintelligible mystery of wickedness! That child was just three years old the very day it was forsaken--she abandoned it and me on its birthday! Twice had that day been observed by us--as the sweetest--the most sacred of holidays; and now that it had again come round--but I not present--for I was on foreign service--thus did she observe it--and disappeared with her paramour. It so happened that we went that day into action--and I committed her and our child to the mercy of God in fervent prayers; for love made me religious--and for their sakes I feared though I shunned not death. I lay all night among the wounded on the field of battle--and it was a severe frost. Pain kept me from sleep, but I saw them as distinctly as in a dream--the mother lying with her child in her bosom in our own bed. Was not that vision mockery enough to drive me mad? After a few weeks a letter came to me from herself--and I kissed it and pressed it to my heart; for no black seal was there--and I knew that little Lucy was alive. No meaning for a while seemed to be in the words--and then they began to blacken into ghastly characters--till at last I gathered from the horrid revelation that she was sunk in sin and shame, steeped for evermore in utmost pollution.

"A friend was with me, and I gave it to him to read--for in my anguish at first I felt no shame--and I watched his face as he read it, that I might see corroboration of the incredible truth, which continued to look like falsehood, even while it pierced my heart with agonising pangs. 'It may be a forgery,' was all he could utter--after long agitation; but the shape of each letter was too familiar to my eyes--the way in which the paper was folded--and I knew my doom was sealed. Hours must have passed, for the room grew dark--and I asked him to leave me for the night. He kissed my forehead--for we had been as brothers. I saw him next morning--dead--cut nearly in two--yet had he left a paper for me, written an hour before he fell, so filled with holiest friendship, that oh! how even in my agony I wept for him, now but a lump of cold clay and blood, and envied him at the same time a soldier's grave!

"And has the time indeed come that I can thus speak calmly of all that horror? The body was brought into my room, and it lay all day and all night close to my bed. But false was I to all our life-long friendship--and almost with indifference I looked upon the corpse. Momentary starts of affection seized me--but I cared little or nothing for the death of him, the tender and the true, the gentle and the brave, the pious and the noble-hearted; my anguish was all for her, the cruel and the faithless, dead to honour, to religion dead--dead to all the sanctities of nature--for her, and for her alone, I suffered all ghastliest agonies--nor any comfort came to me in my despair, from the conviction that she was worthless; for desperately wicked as she had shown herself to be--oh! crowding came back upon me all our hours of happiness--all her sweet smiles--all her loving looks--all her affectionate words--all her conjugal and maternal tendernesses; and the loss of all that bliss--the change of it all into strange, sudden, shameful, and everlasting misery, smote me till I swooned, and was delivered up to a trance in which the rueful reality was mixed up with phantasms more horrible than man's mind can suffer out of the hell of sleep!

"Wretched coward that I was to outlive that night! But my mind was weak from great loss of blood--and the blow so stunned me that I had not strength of resolution to die. I might have torn off the bandages--for nobody watched me--and my wounds were thought mortal. But the love of life had not welled out with all those vital streams; and as I began to recover, another passion took possession of me--and I vowed that there should be atonement and revenge. I was not obscure. My dishonour was known through the whole army. Not a tent--not a hut--in which my name was not bandied about--a jest in the mouths of profligate poltroons--pronounced with pity by the compassionate brave. I had commanded my men with pride. No need had I ever had to be ashamed when I looked on our colours; but no wretch led out to execution for desertion or cowardice ever shrunk from the sun, and from the sight of human faces arrayed around him, with more shame and horror than did I when, on my way to a transport, I came suddenly on my own corps, marching to music as if they were taking up a position in the line of battle--as they had often done with me at their head--all sternly silent before an approaching storm of fire. What brought them there? To do me honour! Me, smeared with infamy, and ashamed to lift my eyes from the mire. Honour had been the idol I worshipped--alas! too, too passionately far--and now I lay in my litter like a slave sold to stripes--and heard as if a legion of demons were mocking me with loud and long huzzas; and then a confused murmur of blessings on our noble commander, so they called me--me, despicable in my own esteem--scorned, insulted, forsaken--me, who could not bind to mine the bosom that for years had touched it--a wretch so poor in power over a woman's heart, that no sooner had I left her to her own thoughts than she felt that she had never loved me, and, opening her fair breast to a new-born bliss, sacrificed me without remorse--nor could bear to think of me any more as her husband--not even for sake of that child whom I knew she loved--for no hypocrite was she there; and oh! lost creature though she was--even now I wonder over that unaccountable desertion--and much she must have suffered from the image of that small bed, beside which she used to sit for hours, perfectly happy from the sight of that face which I too so often blessed in her hearing, because it was so like her own! Where is my child? Have I frightened her away into the wood by my unfatherly looks? She too will come to hate me--oh! see yonder her face and her figure like a fairy's, gliding through among the broom! Sorrow has no business with her--nor she with sorrow. Yet--even her how often have I made weep! All the unhappiness she has ever known has all come from me; and would I but leave her alone to herself in her affectionate innocence, the smile that always lies on her face when she is asleep would remain there--only brighter--all the time her eyes are awake; but I dash it away by my unhallowed harshness, and people looking on her in her trouble wonder to think how sad can be the countenance even of a little child. O God of mercy! what if she were to die!"

"She will not die--she will live," said the pitying pastor; "and many happy years--my son--are yet in store even for you--sorely as you have been tried; for it is not in nature that your wretchedness can endure for ever. She is in herself all-sufficient for a father's happiness. You prayed just now that the God of Mercy would spare her life--and has He not spared it? Tender flower as she seems, yet how full of life! Let not then your gratitude to Heaven be barren in your heart; but let it produce there resignation--if need be, contrition--and, above all, forgiveness."

"Yes! I had a hope to live for--mangled as I was in body, and racked in mind--a hope that was a faith--and bittersweet it was in imagined foretaste of fruition--the hope and the faith of revenge. They said he would not aim at my life. But what was that to me who thirsted for his blood? Was he to escape death, because he dared not wound bone, or flesh, or muscle of mine, seeing that the assassin had already stabbed my soul? Satisfaction! I tell you that I was for revenge. Not that his blood could wipe out the stain with which my name was imbrued, but let it be mixed with the mould; and he who invaded my marriage-bed--and hallowed was it by every generous passion that ever breathed upon woman's breast--let him fall down in convulsions, and vomit out his heart's blood, at once in expiation of his guilt, and in retribution dealt out to him by the hand of him whom he had degraded in the eyes of the whole world beneath the condition even of a felon, and delivered over in my misery to contempt and scorn. I found him out;--there he was before me--in all that beauty by women so beloved--graceful as Apollo; and with a haughty air, as if proud of an achievement that adorned his name, he saluted me--_her husband_--on the field,--and let the wind play with his raven tresses--his curled love-locks--and then presented himself to my aim in an attitude a statuary would have admired. I shot him through the heart."

The good old man heard the dreadful words with a shudder--yet they had come to his ears not unexpectedly, for the speaker's aspect had gradually been growing black with wrath, long before he ended in an avowal of murder. Nor, on ceasing his wild words and distracted demeanour, did it seem that his heart was touched with any remorse. His eyes retained their savage glare--his teeth were clenched--and he feasted on his crime.

"Nothing but a full faith in Divine Revelation," solemnly said his aged friend, "can subdue the evil passions of our nature, or enable conscience itself to see and repent of sin. Your wrongs were indeed great--but without a change wrought in all your spirit, alas! my son! you cannot hope to see the kingdom of heaven."

"Who dares to condemn the deed? He deserved death--and whence was doom to come but from me the Avenger? I took his life--but once I saved it. I bore him from the battlements of a fort stormed in vain--after we had all been blown up by the springing of a mine; and from bayonets that had drunk my blood as well as his--and his widowed mother blessed me as the saviour of her son. I told my wife to receive him as a brother--and for my sake to feel towards him a sister's love. Who shall speak of temptation--or frailty--or infatuation to me? Let the fools hold their peace. His wounds became dearer to her abandoned heart than mine had ever been; yet had her cheek lain many a night on the scars that seamed this breast--for I was not backward in battle, and our place was in the van. I was no coward, that she who loved heroism in him should have dishonoured her husband. True, he was younger by some years than me--and God had given him pernicious beauty--and she was young, too--oh! the brightest of all mortal creatures the day she became my bride--nor less bright with that baby at her bosom--a matron in girlhood's resplendent spring! Is youth a plea for wickedness? And was I old? I, who, in spite of all I have suffered, feel the vital blood yet boiling as to a furnace; but cut off for ever by her crime from fame and glory--and from a soldier in his proud career, covered with honour in the eyes of all my countrymen, changed in an hour into an outlawed and nameless slave. My name has been borne by a race of heroes--the blood in my veins has flowed down a long line of illustrious ancestors--and here am I now--a hidden disguised hypocrite--dwelling among peasants--and afraid--ay, afraid, because ashamed, to lift my eyes freely from the ground even among the solitudes of the mountains, lest some wandering stranger should recognise me, and see the brand of ignominy her hand and his--accursed both--burnt in upon my brow. She forsook this bosom--but tell me if it was in disgust with these my scars?"

And as he bared it, distractedly, that noble chest was seen indeed disfigured with many a gash--on which a wife might well have rested her head with gratitude not less devout because of a lofty pride mingling with life-deep affection. But the burst of passion was gone by--and, covering his face with his hands, he wept like a child.