Chapter XIII: Part 13

The promise, or prediction, to be found in the words of the son of Berechiah, that “at evening-time it shall be light,” is gratefully accepted by devout souls in perhaps a strained and wrested sense; but a sense so comforting, so full of tenderness and beauty, that one is fain to believe the words may favour, if they cannot be said to warrant, this “accommodation of Scripture.” Divines are fain to give technical divinity the go-by for the nonce, while, as they confess, the deepening twilight seldom fails to suggest to them this cheering promise, a promise which “tells how the Christian’s day shall end, how the day of life may be somewhat overcast and dreary, but light shall come on the darkened way at last.” In the same spirit are welcome the words of Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa, concerning One who turneth the shadow of death into the morning. To Him the darkness and the light are both alike; and at His bidding, when despondent sufferers are in a horror of great darkness, and say surely the darkness shall cover them,—even the night shall be light about them; and in some sort to them, even as to Him, the night shineth as the day; or at least, in the language of Zechariah, there is light, which if not clear, is yet not dark; neither wholly day nor night, but twilight—soft, soothing, tranquillizing—instead of the dreaded darkness which may be felt. Even thus He brings the blind by a way that they knew not, making darkness light before them.

Even thus, at the last, He delivers them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. Bunyan exemplifies such in Mr. Fearing, the pilgrim, who at the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death was “ready to die for fear.” But the valley was quiet from troublers. “I suppose those enemies here had now a special check from our Lord, and a command not to meddle until Mr. Fearing had passed over it.” “And here also I took notice of what was very remarkable—the water of that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life; so he went over at last, not much above wetshod.

“_Honesty_: Then it seems he was well at last?”

“_Greatheart_: Yes, yes; I never had a doubt about it.”

Often, observes Schleiermacher in one of his letters, the last radiant moment is called rapidly into being, even in souls wherein the eternal Light has not always shone with bright effulgence.

Biographers of Dr. Johnson tell us how, when at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from his mind; how his temper became unusually patient and gentle, and he ceased to think with terror of death, and of that which lieth beyond death, and spoke much of the mercy of God and of the propitiation of Christ. One might apply to him in effect the lines of the poet of the Seasons.

“Joy seized his withered veins, and one bright gleam
Of setting life shone on her evening hours.”

Meditating on various senses in which the words of the promise of light at evening-time speak truly, in which its great principle holds good, the signal blessing shall come when it is needed most and expected least, Dr. Boyd, thinks mainly how sometimes, at the close of the chequered and sober day, the Better Sun has broken through the clouds and made the flaming west all purple and gold. He pictures the chamber of death, while hushed and mournful gazers see also the summer sun in glory going down. “But it is only to us who remain that the evening darkness is growing, only for us that the sun is going down.” As the evening falls on us, but not on the departing believer; as the shadows deepen on us, but not on him; as the darkness gathers on us, but not on him; the “glorious promise has found its perfect fulfilment, that ‘at the evening-time there shall be light.’”

Secular literature has its analogous instances. Dr. Holmes describes Elsie Venner’s storm-tossed, vagrant spirit as composed and serene at the last; the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes, and the stormy scowl disappeared from the dark brows. “It seemed to her father as if the malign influence—evil spirit it might almost be called—which had pervaded her being had at last been driven forth or exorcised,” and that the tears she now shed were “at once the sign and the pledge of her redeemed nature. But now she was to be soothed and not excited. After her tears she slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.” And the devoted father, to whom her life-long career had been until now a perturbing trial, now thanked God for the brief interval of peace which had been granted her, and for the sweet communion they had enjoyed in these last days. There are those of whom it may be said that it comes to pass, when midday is over, and they cast wistful glances, and perhaps even reproachful petitions heavenwards, until evening-time, that there is from above neither voice, nor any to answer, nor seemingly any that regardeth; but with evening-time comes an answer and comes light. Applicable to the subject, in this sense, are the lines in “Paracelsus,” on one who lived without God in the world:—

“Then died, grown old; and just an hour before—
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes—
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June.”

Of Margaret Arundel, in “The Gordian Knot,” we read, in her hour of household desolation and distress, that could we have seen her fair face, now pale with pain, now flushed with emotion, we should have pitied her; but “it may be that some superior intelligence witnessed her suffering, and pitied her not; knowing that all she was to undergo was but the fiery trial destined for those for whom in the evening there is light.” Stephen Blackpool, in “Hard Times,” who has found life “aw a muddle,” and meets with his death in the pit, is tranquillized with light at the last—light which he identifies with the star that shone upon him while he lay mangled in the old shaft. “Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin’ on me down there in my trouble, I thowt it were the very star as guided to our Saviour’s home. I awmost think it be the very star.” His rescuers lift him up, and he is overjoyed to find they are about to take him in the direction whither the star seems to him to lead. Very gently they carry him along the fields and down the lanes; but it is soon a funeral procession. “The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor; and through humility and sorrow and forgiveness, he had gone to his Saviour’s rest.” It is not every life the early prime of which has been blissful enough to warrant the exclamation,—

“Ne’er tell me of glories serenely adorning
The close of our day, the calm eve of our night:
Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning,
Its smiles and its tears are worth evening’s best light.”

For sometimes the light comes at evening-time that has never come before.

Cellini opens his autobiography with a placid record of the enjoyment of his present lot, in life’s decline, in contrast with the storms and turmoil of his previous course. We read of James Watt, that not until he had reached what is termed the grand climacteric of man’s life did he know real freedom from bodily infirmities; and that his spirits became more equable as the principal causes of his anxiety and occasional depression were removed; so that although he was destined to be one of those “who are so strong that they come to fourscore years,” his strength even then, while it could scarcely be termed “labour,” was certainly very far from “sorrow.” The cloud which had so long hung over him was gently lifted up, and the curtain parted, to disclose a happier scene. “It is curious that even physical ease and enjoyment should come so late; but so it was. The term which commenced with his release from the evils of active business was a serene and golden time, in which he found repose”—with the softening retrospect of a struggle past and a victory won. John Galt, in “The Entail,” exemplifies a kindred experience in the widow Walkinshaw, whose deliverance from an all but lifelong thraldom, late in the day as it came, yet came in time enough to “allow the original brightness of her mind to shine out in the evening with a serene and pleasing lustre.”

Dr. Boyd quotes the dying speech of a poor English day labourer, than which, he affirms, few sentences ever touched him more with their hopeless pathos: “Wut wi’ faeth, and wut wi’ the earth goin’ round the sun, and wut wi’ the railways all a-whuzzing and a-buzzing, I’m clean muddled, confoozled, and bet!” It is Stephen Blackpool again in spirit, and to the letter. With that sentence the dying man is said to have feebly turned to the wall, and spoken no more. “Well, let us hope that light came at the evening-time upon that blind, benighted way.”

Among the dying words of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, honourably known by her “Memoirs of Port Royal,” and other works, the remark is preserved that she had often in her life been inclined to occupy herself with the prospect close at hand, from finding the bleak, hard outline of the eternal hills cold and barren to her sight; but that, as she drew nearer, God’s mercy made His light to shine full upon them, so that she could now perceive they were covered with magnificent trees of the forest, and were rich in fruit and flowers far more pleasant than those close at hand, and yet a continuation of them.

A commentator on the text of “promised light at evening-time,” explains that by evening is understood the gradual withdrawal of the light; it is the lessening light that makes the evening-time: because of _that_ the daisies close, and the birds fly to their nests, and a hush comes over nature. And it is just because evening is the time when, in the ordinary course of things, the light is going and the darkness is coming, that there is found to be anything remarkable in the text of _um den Abend wird es licht seyn_, as Luther’s version runs. The promise, or prophecy, is that “light shall come at a time when it is not natural, when in the common course of things it is not looked for.” It would be no surprise, as this divine proceeds to remark, that light should come at noonday: we expect it then, it is just what we are accustomed to see. “But if, when the twilight shadows were falling deeper and deeper, ... with a sudden burst the noonday light were to spread around,—that would be a surprise.” One of his personal illustrations of its import is the instance of the Christian poet who passed away almost in despair,—the gloom that overshadowed his spirit enduring almost to the end: “but even in the last moment there came a wonderful change”—and they tell us how even on his dead face there remained, till it was hidden for ever, a look of bright and beautiful and sudden surprise; the reflection of that light at evening that had been long in coming, but had come at last. At eventide light may break forth as the morning; light rising in obscurity, and darkness becoming as the noonday.

Light in darkness—light springing up out of darkness—the blessedness of this is emphatically recognised both by signal example and in special promise, in Holy Writ. When the hand of Moses was stretched out toward heaven, and darkness fell over the land of Egypt, even darkness which might be felt—a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days—the Egyptians saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings. “When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.” “For thou wilt light my candle; the Lord my God will enlighten my darkness.” In the same Psalm that tells how clouds and darkness are round about Him, the Father of lights, is contained the exulting assurance, that “light is sown for the righteous.” The light of the righteous rejoiceth, when the lamp of the wicked hath been put out. Well may spiritual aspirations be fervent for light to be sent forth, to lead and to guide to His holy hill and tabernacle, lest the feet of the wayfarer slip in a way that he knows not; and, above all, when they stumble on the dark mountains, or lose their footing in the swelling of Jordan.

_Lux è tenebris_—who will not prize it? who does not need it? For—

“What am I?
An infant crying in the night,
An infant _crying for the light_,
And with no language but a cry.”

An exceeding bitter cry this crying for the light sometimes is, in such as those, for instance, whom Robertson of Brighton describes as “turning from side to side,” feeling with horror the old, and all they hold dear, crumbling away—the ancient light going out—more than half suspecting the falsehood of the rest, and with an earnestness amounting to agony, leaving their home, like the Magians, and inquiring for fresh light.

Turning from side to side, with the wailing note of interrogation, “Who will show us any good?” And then, more earnestly than ever, “Lord, lift Thou up the LIGHT of Thy countenance upon us.” In vain we turn from side to side. To whom should we go but unto Thee? Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts; show the LIGHT of Thy countenance, and we shall be saved.

Observable for special application is what Locke makes observable as a general fact, that new-born children always turn their eyes to that part whence the light comes, lay them how you please.

When the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, it is suggestively remarked by an eminent author, that the same succouring hand which has opened to them the visible world, immediately shuts out the bright prospect again for a time, a bandage being passed over the eyes, lest in the first tenderness of their recovered sense, they should be fatally affected by the sudden transition from darkness to light. But, as he goes on to say, between the awful blank of total privation of vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies the widest difference. “In the moment of their restoration the blind have but one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam of brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot extinguish. The new darkness is not like the void darkness of old: it is filled with rapid, changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms, rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.” And thus is it made evident that even when the handkerchief is passed over them, the once sightless eyes, though bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as they were before. All the more, however, they now dread the blankness of that total eclipse, now that, as it were, to them that walked in the shadow of death, light is sprung up. Light, how much the more precious for that background of blackness of darkness, darkness that still may be felt!

Light that may be felt, is the theme of blind old Œdipus, in Sophocles, at the hour of his mysterious departure—the hour and the power of darkness. Farewell he bids to—

“Light, sweet Light!
Rayless to me—mine once, and even now
I feel thee palpable, round this worn form
Clinging in last embrace.”

Immortal as Homer is the prayer of his Ajax to die, if die he must, in the light. Contrast with this the _modus moriendi_ of Pompey the Great, as pictured in Corneille:—

“D’un des pans de sa robe it couvre son visage,
A son mauvais dentin en aveugle obéit,
Et dédaigne de voir le ciel qui le trahit.”

So with the Greek wife in Landor’s Hellenics, who resists the bidding to fall not on her knees, but to look up:—

“The hand
That is to slay me, best may slay me thus.
I dare no longer see the light of heaven.”[35]

But to die in the light is the almost universal craving. “As a matter of fact, nothing,” it has been remarked, “is more common than the craving and demand for light a little before death;” a remark confirmed by the sad experience of many who have tended and watched the last moments of a friend. “What more frequent than a prayer to open the shutters, and let in the sun? What complaint more repeated, and more touching than that ‘it is growing dark’?” We are told of a sufferer who did not seem in immediate danger, suddenly ordering the sick room to be lit up as for a gala. When this was mentioned to the physician, he said, gravely, “No worse sign.” We all remember the tenor of the last words of Dr. Adam, of the High School, Edinburgh, as recorded (however variously) by Scott and Lord Cockburn and others. It was in his bed-chamber, and in the forenoon, that he died; and finding that he could not see, the old schoolmaster, believing himself in the familiar school-room, exclaimed, “It is getting dark, boys; we must put off the rest till to-morrow.” It was the darkness of death. And to the living, to-morrow, above all, _that_ to-morrow, never comes.

M. de Lescure, dying of the wounds he had received at the battle of Chollet, awaited with his usual serenity the advent of his last hour. “Open the windows,” said he to his wife, who was watching by his bedside, “is it clear?” “Yes,” she said, “the sun is shining.” “I have, then,” replied the dying general, “a veil before my eyes.” A veil that no man could raise. Chateaubriand, in describing the last hours of his sister, Madame de Beaumont—the Lucile of his “Memoires d’outre-tombe”—incidentally relates that “she begged of me to open the window.... A ray of sunshine rested upon her bed, and seemed to rejoice her spirit.” The same circumstance is related of the dying Emperor Alexander. So it is of Dr. Channing. Karl Ludwig Sand, on the scaffold, begged that the bandage over his eyes might be so placed that he could, until his last moment, see the light. And it was so. Turner’s biographer tells us that almost at the very hour of the old painter’s death, his landlady wheeled his chair to the window, that he might see the sunshine he had loved so much, mantling the river, and glowing on the sails of the passing boats. “The old painter died with the winter-morning sun shining upon his face, as he was lying in his bed. The attendant drew up the window-blind, and the morning sun shone on the dying artist—the sun he had so often beheld with such love and such veneration,” and painted, at sundry times and in divers manners, with such force.

Rousseau’s wish, when in a dying state, to be carried into the open air, that he might have “a parting look at the glorious orb of day,” is referred to by one of the many biographers of Robert Burns, in recording that poet’s remark one beautiful evening, when the sun was shining brightly through the casement. The hand of death was then upon him, and a young friend rose to let down the window-blinds, fearing the light might be too much for him. Burns thanked her, with a look of great benignity, but prayed her to let the sun shine on: “he will not shine long for me.”

Tender and true is the pathos in one of Mrs. Richard Trench’s letters, touching the death of her endeared child, Bessy, where we read: “The last phrase she uttered, except those expressive of her latest wants and pain, was a desire the window-curtain might be withdrawn, that she might look at the stars.” Sunlight or starlight, it is light we cherish, and that cherishes us. Light from the first, light to the last. Happy, if the light we cherish is the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.

Another set of variations on the same theme will form the section next ensuing.

_WISHED-FOR DAY._

ACTS xxvii. 29.

It was in a ship of Alexandria, sailing into Italy, when sailing was now dangerous, because of the advanced season; it was during a voyage which Paul, a passenger, foresaw and foretold would be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of lives two hundred threescore and sixteen; it was after there had arisen against the ship a tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, before which the vessel became a helpless drift; then it was that the crew and passengers, exceedingly tossed with the tempest, and not comforted—except the apostle, gave up, with the same exception, all hope of escape, and gloomily awaited the bitter end. On the third day they cast out the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on them, all hope that they should be saved was then taken away. The fourteenth night was come, and they were driven up and down in Adria, and about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country, and sounded once and again, and found reason to fear lest they should have fallen upon rocks. So they cast four anchors out of the stern, and _wished for the day_—ηὔχοντο ἡμέραν γενέσθαι. If ’tis double death to die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the sun was going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. With something of a shuddering sympathy can they connect the fact that, on the day whence all Good Fridays take their name, there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour, with that other fact that about the ninth hour there was heard a wailing cry, whose echo reverberates through all space and time, _Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?_

Ever memorable in classical lore is the supplication of the Greek warrior in Homer, not to die in the dark. Let him see his foe, and see his end, however imminent, however inevitable. King Edward II., in Christopher Marlowe’s historical tragedy, left alone in the Berkeley Castle dungeon with Lightborn, a murderer, exclaims:—

“I see my tragedy written in thy brows;
Yet stay awhile, forbear thy bloody hand,
And let me see the stroke before it comes,
That even then, when I shall lose my life,
My mind may be more steadfast on my God.”

Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère, who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice, “Fire, my friends!” Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to have his eyes bandaged. “For five-and-twenty years,” he said, “I have been accustomed to face the balls of the enemy.” Then taking off his hat with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, “My comrades, fire on me.” Murat fell in a like manner, after a like request,—but gazing to the last on a medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children.

What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical romance of “Antonina,” when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius, is the distracting absence of light. “Bewildered and daunted by the darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess.... Suddenly he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice ascended to him, groaning, ‘Light, light! oh, where is the light?’” She is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own avenging guilt, and “by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent and the weak have been known to brave.” It is only your melodramatic villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in “Braganza,”—addressing the duke, his judge:—

“Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down.
Welcome, congenial darkness! horrors, hail!
No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun
Whose irksome beams light up thy pageant triumph.”

And thus Sir Walter Scott has full warranty for proving the exceptional courage of his captive Englishman, when subjected to a midnight trial in the vaults of the _Vehmgericht_, by showing him unappalled by even the utter darkness of that terrible court. “Even in these agitating circumstances, the mind of the undaunted Englishman remained unshaken, and his eyelid did not quiver nor his heart beat quicker, though he seemed, according to the expression of Scripture, to be a pilgrim in the valley of the shadow of death, beset by numerous snares, and encompassed by total darkness, where light was most necessary for safety.” It is only in an oblique sense that what Euripides says is true, of the coward being very valiant in the dark—ἐν ὄρφνῃ δραπέτης μέγα σθένει.

Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns. But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. “Nothing could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition of his warrior’s prayer, that ‘live or die, it might be in the light of day.’” One is reminded of the lines in Racine:—

“Enfin toute l’horreur d’un combat ténébreux;
Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?”

It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash and collision occurred in a tunnel—in that very place which nobody, even on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question—that “Ajax’s prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes us in daylight.”

In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (_deadly night_, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. “No nurse’s tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful.” Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy: it is the negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light.

The last words audible of Goethe were, “_More light!_” The final darkness grew apace, in the words of his ablest biographer; and he whose eternal longings had been for more light, gave a parting cry for it as he was passing under the shadow of death.

“Light! give me more light,” is the cry of the dying woman in “The Dead Secret,”—whereby hangs that tale. How often Lord Lytton remarks, is “light!” the last word of those round whom the shades are gathering. And he says it in reference to the last hours of one of the characters he has described with most success as well as elaboration, John Burley, who discourses of what is precious in light, as the darkness closes about him. When he lies down, and the attendant would withdraw the light, he moves uneasily. “Not that,” he murmurs, “light to the last!” And putting forth a wan hand, he draws aside the curtain, so that the light may fall full on his face. When his only friend returns, and steals back to Burley’s room on tiptoe, it is to see light stream through the cottage lattice—not the miserable ray lit by a human hand—but the still and holy effulgence of a moonlit heaven. Burley has died in sleep—calmly, and the half open eyes have the look of inexpressible softness which death sometimes leaves; “and still they were turned towards the light; and the light burned clear.” Which things are an allegory.

Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky is never seen—nor anything else. What he does see of the “light of day” he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of the curse, “Let it look for light and have none.” Piteous indeed is the import of the pathetic remonstrance, “Wherefore is light given to him in misery?” Graphic indeed is the description of a place “where the light is as darkness.” Darkness and light are both alike to One only.

The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as follows:—“On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, ‘I see how it is.’”

John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged from his master’s employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William, ‘Son of God, shine upon me!’ and immediately the sun in the element shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time before.”

_THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND._

PROVERBS xviii. 24.

In the last book of the Pentateuch we meet with a verse which, incidentally, seems to recognise how much more vitally close and intimate may be the affinity between a man and his bosom friend, than between the same man and his own brother. The brother is spoken of without descriptive epithet or adjunct of any kind; while of the friend it is added, “which is as thine own soul.”[36] An ever memorable verse in the book of Proverbs has immortalized the truth, that “there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.”

None too many are the testimonies on record of brotherly attachment such as Columbus signalizes in his correspondence. To his elder son, Diego, the affectionate father writes concerning the younger, Fernando, then a stripling midway in his teens, “To thy brother conduct thyself as the elder brother should unto the younger. Thou hast no other, and I praise God that this is such a one as thou dost need. Ten brothers would not be too many for thee. Never have I found a better friend to right or left than my brothers.” General testimony points the other way. Cicero, who, himself a good brother, in one place moots the question whether it is just to prefer our friends to our relations—_quæritur sitne æquum amicos cognatis anteferre_,—in another decides that friendship is better than relationship: _præstat amicitia propinquitati_. It has been remarked by Samuel Bailey, of Sheffield, that parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, reciprocally complain of each other’s deficiency of affection, and think it hard that the tie of relationship should not secure invariable kindness and indestructible love: expecting some secret influence of blood, some physical sympathy, some natural attraction, to retain the affection of their relatives, without any solicitude on their part to cherish or confirm it; and forgetting that man is so constituted as to love only what in some way or other, directly or indirectly, immediately or remotely, gives him pleasure,—that even natural affection is the result of pleasurable associations in his mind, or at least may be overcome by associations of an opposite character, and that the sure way to make themselves beloved is to display amiable qualities to those whose regard they wish to obtain.[37] Crabbe has a terse couplet on—

... “those
Who are called friends because they are not foes;”

meaning by friends, kinsfolk; but such as, though not more than kin, are less than kind. Dr. Croly’s hero, Marston, soldier and statesman, on receiving, in his isolation, three letters from three proved friends, yet comparative strangers, describes himself as feeling, “while holding their letters in my hand, and almost pressing them to my heart, how much more strongly friendship may bind us than the ties of cold and negligent relationship.” So Mr. Thackeray is bitter on what it is to have sham friends and no sympathy; ties of kindred which bind one, as it were, to the corpse of friendship, and oblige one to bear through life the weight and the embraces of this lifeless, cold connection.

Noteworthy among the avowals of Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Religio Medici,” is this: “I confess I do not observe that order that the schools ordain our affections,—to love our parents, wives, children, and then our friends; for, excepting the injunctions of religion, I do not find in myself such a necessary and indissoluble sympathy to all those of my blood. I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe the principles of life.” The father and the son may, as Montaigne says, be of quite contrary humours, and brothers be without any sympathy with brothers. So Feltham asserts it to be likeness which makes the true love-knot of friendship. When we find another of our own disposition, what is it, he asks, but the same soul in a divided body? “We are then intermutually transposed into each other; and nature, which makes us love ourselves, makes us for the same reason love those who are like us; hence a friend is a more sacred name than a brother.” What avails it, he further asks, to have bodies of the same original, when the souls within them differ?

The autobiographer in a modern work of fiction, having occasion to acknowledge, after being thrust amongst strangers to sicken, and all but die, that among strangers he received as much sympathy and kindness as he should have done among his own people, and in his father’s house,—characterizes this sort of confession as one which people are apt to make as a reflection upon their relations, “whereas it disgraces only themselves.” It is a case of rare misfortune, he contends, when we are not loved by our nearest of kin, in proportion as we desire and deserve to excite affection. Nevertheless, there is a too ample _consensus_ of authorities whose testimony affirms, and confirms, the often slight and slender tenure of mere family ties, as such. “None of your family parties for me,” quoth one of Justice Haliburton’s shrewd spokesmen; “connections at best are poor friends, and commonly bitter enemies. If you want nothing, go to them, and you are sure to get it; if you are in want of any assistance, go to a stranger friend you have _made for yourself_, and that’s the boy that has a heart and a hand for you.” The Earl of Dudley, Bishop Copleston’s correspondent, in one of his always interesting letters to that prelate, adverting to the death of an uncle who had never taken the smallest interest in him, or showed him the smallest kindness, makes the avowal: “And, though I flatter myself that there is no person more capable of returning affection than myself, yet I fairly own that I am wholly unable to bestow it quite gratuitously even upon a near relation.” Richardson harps on this note again and again in his history of Clarissa. How much more binding and tender, that young lady writes—and the writing comes of bitter experience—are the ties of pure friendship and the union of like minds, than the ties of nature! And her chief correspondent, in commenting on the terms of a kinsman’s assurance, that he will not see Clarissa “imposed on either by friend or foe,”—interposes the verbal amendment: “By _relation_ or foe, should he not have said? For a friend will not impose upon a friend.” Elsewhere the same writer has to put the home-question: “Would you side with a false brother against a true friend? A brother may not be a friend; but a friend will be always a brother.”

It was one of the aphorisms—or call them paradoxes—of M. de Stendhal (Henri Beyle) that our next of kin are our natural enemies when we enter the world; the simple matter of fact being, as an Edinburgh reviewer alleges, that his own character, tendencies, and aspirations had been invariably opposed to the plans, wishes, and modes of thinking of his family. Mr. Froude has depicted in Edward Fowler a young man who in his dealings with every one except with his own family, was frank, generous, and unselfish; and whose affections, naturally very strong, finding themselves forced out of their proper channel, poured themselves out on any one that happened to attract him. A few kind words from his father, now and then, implying real sympathy and inviting confidence, might, we are given to understand, have averted in this case, as in so many others, a bitter result of estrangement and desolation. Perhaps, as Mr. Disraeli somewhere intimates, with all their anxiety and opportunities for observation, the parent and tutor are rarely skilful in discovering the character of their child or charge. “Custom blunts the fineness of psychological study: those with whom we have lived long and early, are apt to blend our essential and our accidental qualities in one bewildering association.” Strange, exclaims Hamilton Aïde, how little we often know of those who are next us in the battle-ranks through this long march of life! Our daily familiar life, as George Eliot has remarked, is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good. “Strangers yet,” as Lord Houghton has it:—

“After childhood’s winning ways,
After care, and blame, and praise,
Counsel asked, and wisdom given,
After mutual prayers to heaven,
Child and parent scarce regret
When they part—are strangers yet.”

Or as Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same relative truth, too absolutely true:—

“Kindred are oft but kin by name,
Our thoughts they never knew.”

_MANY YEARS TO ENJOY LIFE: THIS NIGHT TO DIE._

ST. LUKE xii. 19, 20.

The rich man was getting richer to his heart’s content. So plentiful was the produce of his land, that he must needs enlarge his premises. There was not room enough in his barns for those golden harvests; the barns must be pulled down, and greater ones built, wherein to bestow all his fruits and his goods. Happy man he accounted himself that day; happy in a prosperous present, happier still in a promising future. A future of happiness not less prolonged than assured. So he would say to his soul that day, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” That day he said it. Fool! that night his soul was required of him.

Woe was denounced by one of old on another of the Dives family, who said, “I will build me a wide house, and large chambers,” and who cut him out windows, and ceiled his house with cedar, and painted it with vermilion. “Shalt thou reign because thou closest thyself in cedar?” Man’s sanguine and sure “I will”—how little of the future tense there sometimes is about it after all!

“Tu secanda marmora
Locas sub ipsum funus; et sepulchri
Immemor, struis domos.”

In Homer we see from his tall ship the king of men descend, there fondly thinking the gods conclude his toil, where, in fact, awaits him murder most foul and most unnatural. In Homeric figure—

“So, whilst he feeds luxurious in the stall,
The sovereign of the herd is doomed to fall.”

Bitterly the shade of Atrides repeats his tragic story to Odysseus, telling how, “Alas! he hoped, the toils of war o’ercome, to meet soft quiet and repose at home. Delusive hope!” for at home the hand was already upraised to smite him.

The Turkish prince, Alp Arslan, dying of Joseph’s dagger-stroke, bequeathed an admonition to the pride of kings, which Gibbon has preserved. “Yesterday, as from an eminence I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under my feet; and I said in my heart, ‘Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors.’ These armies are no longer mine; and in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an assassin.” The inscription on his tomb invited those who had seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, to meditate on its present burial in the dust.

Michelet moralises with trenchant irony on the fate which overtook our Henry V. on French soil. It is to the “Dance of Death” he refers in the exclamation, “What sport for death, what a malicious pastime to have brought the victorious Harry within a month’s reach of the crown of France! After a life of unremitting toil for that end, he wanted but one little month added to his existence to be the survivor of Charles VI.... No! not a month, not a day more was to be his.”

Splendid was that festival at Cæsarea at which Herod Agrippa, in the pomp and pride of power, entered the theatre in a robe of silver, which glittered, says the historian, with the morning rays of the sun, so as to dazzle the eyes of the assembly, and excite general admiration. Some of his flatterers set up the shout, “A present god!” Agrippa did not repress the impious adulation which spread through the theatre. At that moment he looked up, and saw an owl perched over his head on a rope, and Agrippa had been forewarned that when next he saw that bird, “at the height of his fortune,” he would die within five days. The fatal omen, according to Josephus, pierced the heart of the king, who, with deep melancholy, exclaimed, “Your god will soon suffer the common lot of mortality.” He was immediately struck, in the language of the sacred volume, by an angel. Seized with violent pains, he was carried to his palace, lingered five days in extreme agony, being “eaten of worms,” and so died.

Fielding forcibly presents a certain sanguine projector, lusty and strong, in the heyday of middle age, who reckons confidently on becoming heir to the estate of a senior of immense wealth, and has all his plans elaborately prepared for his disposal of the same. Nothing is wanting to enable him to enter upon the immediate execution of these plans, but the death of the elder man, in calculating which he has studied every book extant that treats of the value of lives, reversions, etc.; from all which he has satisfied himself, that as he has every day a chance of this happening, so has he more an even chance of its happening before long. “But while the captain was one day busied in deep contemplations of this kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as most unseasonable, accidents happened to him. The utmost malice of fortune could, indeed, have contrived nothing so cruel, so _mal-à-propos_, so absolutely destructive to all his schemes.” It was, that just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by the other’s death, he himself was cut off by an apoplexy. As Léontine complains in “Heraclius,”—

“Et lorsque le hasard me flatte avec excès,
Tout mon dessein avorte au milieu du succès.”

It was just when Kleber was beginning to reap the fruits of his intrepidity and discretion, that he was cut off by the obscure assassin, Souliman. One is reminded of Thomson on the massacre of the bees,—

“At evening snatched,
Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night,
And fixed o’er sulphur; while not dreaming ill,
The happy people in their waxen cells,
Sat tending public cares, and planning schemes
Of temperance, for winter poor,” etc.

A tory historian, recording the close of the parliamentary session in July 1827, takes occasion to observe that Mr. Canning now saw every wish of his heart gratified, having raised himself to the highest position in the State, and being looked up to in every part of the world as the protector of the oppressed and the advocate of freedom. In the prime of life, “his sway in Parliament was unbounded, and he might hope for a long career of fame, fortune, and usefulness.” _Vanitas vanitatum!_ The hand of fate was already upon him, and he was to be suddenly snatched from the scene of his glory, at the very moment when he seemed to have attained the summit of earthly felicity. Even, however, when death is not concerned, as in his memorable case, in the sudden and final collapse of a great career, and the abrupt extinction of exuberant promise, how often is Cowper’s picture realized, where—

“Runs the mountainous and craggy ridge
That tempts ambition. On the summit, see,
The seals of office glitter in his eyes;
He climbs, he pants, he grasps them. At his heels,
Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends,
And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down,
And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.”

The picture is, in some sort, and for moral uses, a pendent to that by another poet, of those who are pushing hard up hill the cumbrous load of life; just as they trust to gain the farthest steep, and put an end to strife,—

“Down thunders back the stone with mighty sweep,
And hurls their labours to the valley deep,
For ever vain.”

But this is diverging farther and farther from the direct import of our theme. More to the purpose is the same poet’s description of Celadon assuring his betrothed of perfect safety, and triumphantly asserting her absolute immunity from the perils of the storm, and as exultingly inferring his own, from his relationship to her; when,—

“From his void embrace,
Mysterious heaven! that moment to the ground,
A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid.”

Some innocents, as Cleopatra has it, escape not the thunderbolt. Innocence, as well as iniquity, may know something of that breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.

The loving friends of Charlotte Brontè, after her marriage, are described by one among them as catching occasional glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling to them who stood outside, of the gladness within; and they said among themselves, “After a long and a hard struggle—after many cares and bitter sorrows—she is tasting happiness now.” Remembering her trials, they were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. “But God’s ways are not as our ways,” Mrs. Gaskell adds. Just as Currer Bell’s happiness seemed beginning, and her goodness ripening, came fever, delirium, death. Mrs. Gaskell’s own career was similarly cut short, just when she was finishing, but ere yet she had finished, the completest and ablest of her works; just when public recognition of her merits was growing earnest as well as general. It is the old, old story. For what, as the old ballad says,—

“is this worldys bliss,
That changeth as the moon!
My summer’s day in lusty May
Is darked before the noon.”

_GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST._

DANIEL iv. 29-33.

Walking in the palace of his kingdom of Babylon—that Babylon of which the foundations, indeed, had been laid ages ago, but which he had so enlarged and adorned as to make it one of the world’s wonders—Nebuchadnezzar the king, elate with pride at the pomp of architectural results, flushed with the triumph of enterprises so costly, and achievements so manifest to the eye, gave utterance, in complacent soliloquy perhaps, to the exultant sense of being a master builder indeed, and of seeing his power reflected in so gorgeous a form. The king spake and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee.” And the sequel we know. How that same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws,—is it not written in the book of the prophecies of Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, and whom the king made ruler over the whole province of that same Babylon the Great?

The royal builder’s boast was on the instant reproved by a degradation literally brutal in its extremity. While the word of complacent self-glorification was in the king’s mouth, the sentence of bestial doom went forth against him. Just when he was resting on his laurels, a taint overtook them. Just when he rejoiced in asserting himself a king of kings, commenced the working of a curse which levelled him with grazing flocks and herds.

The lesson is for all time, and for all sorts and conditions of men. Verifications of it—varying, of course, in kind, and still more in degree—are rife in records historical and biographical, and in the unrecorded experiences, the moving accidents, of everyday life. Just when a man is apt to set up his rest, the fiat goes forth against him which shatters to its base the structure he has reared. The house he has just finished building tumbles to pieces like a house of cards. The castle in whose defences, at last completed, he felt so secure, dislimns like a castle in the air.

“... The engineer
Who lays the last stone of his sea-built tower,
It cost him years and years of toil to raise,—
And, smiling at it, tells the wind and waves
To roar and whistle now—but, in a night,
Beholds the tempest sporting in its place—
May look aghast.”

Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand, and displayed the golden vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple at Jerusalem, and was jubilant with the excitement of revelry, and joyously confident in the stability of his realm; when, in the same hour, there came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and what they wrote was, that God had numbered his kingdom, and finished it. And in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.