Chapter I (2)

he had acquired the power of self-restraint, and could stop when the glass was circulating too freely. At the memorable dinner of the Literary Fund, at which the good Prince Albert presided, (on the 11th of May, 1842,) the two poets, Campbell and Moore, had to make speeches. The author of the "Pleasures of Hope," heedless of the duty that devolved upon him, had "confused his brain." Moore came in the evening of that day to our house; and I well remember the terms of true sorrow and bitter reproach in which he spoke of the lamentable impression that one of the great authors of the age and country must have left on the mind of the royal chairman, then new among us.

It is gratifying to record, that the temptations to which the great lyric poet, Thomas Moore, was so often and so peculiarly exposed, were ever powerless for wrong.

Moore sat for his portrait to Shee, Lawrence, Newton, Maclise, Mulvany, and Richmond, and to the sculptors Ternerani, Chantrey, Kirk, and Moore. On one occasion of his sitting, he says,--"Having nothing in my round potato face but what painters cannot catch,--mobility of character,--the consequence is, that a portrait of me can be only one or other of two disagreeable things,--_caput mortuum_, or a caricature." Richmond's portrait was taken in 1843. Moore says of it,--"The artist has worked wonders with unmanageable faces such as mine." Of all his portraits, this is the one that pleases me best, and most forcibly recalls him to my remembrance.

I soon learned to love the man. It was easy to do so; for Nature had endowed him with that rare, but happy gift,--to have pleasure in giving pleasure, and pain in giving pain; while his life was, or at all events seemed to be, a practical comment on his own lines:--

"They may rail at this life; from the hour I began it,
I've found it a life full of kindness and bliss."

I had daily walks with him at Sloperton,--along his "terrace-walk,"--during our brief visit; I listening, he talking; he now and then asking questions, but rarely speaking of himself or his books. Indeed, the only one of his poems to which he made any special reference was his "Lines on the Death of Sheridan," of which he said,--"That is one of the few things I have written of which I am really proud." And I remember startling him one evening by quoting several of his poems in which he had said "hard things" of women,--then, suddenly changing, repeating passages of an opposite character, and his saying, "You know far more of my poems than I do myself."

The anecdotes he told me were all of the class of those I have related,--simple, unostentatious. He has been frequently charged with the weakness of undue respect for the aristocracy. I never heard him, during the whole of our intercourse, speak of great people with whom he had been intimate, never a word of the honors accorded to him; and, certainly, he never uttered a sentence of satire or censure or harshness concerning any one of his contemporaries. I cannot recall any conversation with him in which he spoke of intimacy with the great, and certainly no anecdote of his familiarity with men or women of the upper orders; although he conversed with me often of those who are called the lower classes. I remember his describing with proud warmth his visit to his friend Boyse, at Bannow, in the County of Wexford: the delight he enjoyed at receiving the homage of bands of the peasantry, gathered to greet him; the arches of green leaves under which he passed; and the dances with the pretty peasant-girls,--one in particular, with whom he led off a country-dance.[L] Would that those who fancied him a tuft-hunter could have heard him! They would have seen how really humble was his heart. Indeed, a reference to his Journal will show that of all his contemporaries, whenever he spoke of them, he had ever something kindly to say. There is no evidence of ill-nature in any case,--not a shadow of envy or jealousy. The sturdiest Scottish grazier could not have been better pleased than he was to see the elegant home at Abbotsford, or have felt prouder to know that a poet had been created a baronet. When speaking of Wordsworth's absorption of all the talk at a dinner-table, Moore says,--"But I was well pleased to be a listener." And he records, that General Peachey, "who is a neighbor of Southey, mentions some amiable traits of him."

The house at Sloperton is a small, neat, but comparatively poor cottage, for which Moore paid originally the princely sum of forty pounds a year, "furnished." Subsequently, however, he became its tenant under a repairing-lease at eighteen pounds annual rent. He took possession of it in November, 1817. Bessy was "not only satisfied, but delighted with it, which shows the humility of her taste," writes Moore to his mother; "for it is a small thatched cottage, and we get it furnished for forty pounds a year." "It has a small garden and lawn in front, and a kitchen-garden behind. Along two of the sides of this kitchen-garden is a raised bank,"--the poet's "terrace-walk," so he loved to call it. Here a small deal table stood through all weathers; for it was his custom to compose as he walked, and at this table to pause and write down his thoughts. Hence he had always a view of the setting sun; and I believe nothing on earth gave him more intense pleasure than practically to realize the line,--

"How glorious the sun looked in sinking!"--

for, as Mrs. Moore has since told us, he very rarely missed this sight.

In 1811, the year of his marriage, he lived at York Terrace, Queen's Elm, Brompton. Mrs. Moore tells me it was a pretty house: the Terrace was then isolated, and opposite nursery-gardens. Long afterwards (in 1824) he went to Brompton to "indulge himself with a sight of that house." In 1812 he was settled at Kegworth; and in 1813, at Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends, who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this cottage he himself writes,--"It was a poor place, little better than a barn; but we at once took it and set about making it habitable."

As Burns was made a gauger because he was partial to whiskey, Moore was made Colonial Secretary at Bermuda, where his principal duty was to "overhaul the accounts of skippers and their mates." Being called to England, his affairs were placed in charge of a superintendent, who betrayed him, and left him answerable for a heavy debt, which rendered necessary a temporary residence in Paris. That debt, however, was paid, not by the aid of friends, some of whom would have gladly relieved him of it, but literally by "the sweat of his brow." Exactly so it was when the MS. "Life of Byron" was burned: it was by Moore, and not by the relatives of Byron, (neither was it by aid of friends,) the money he had received was returned to the publisher who had advanced it. "The glorious privilege of being independent" was, indeed, essentially his,--in his boyhood, throughout his manhood, and in advanced age,--always!

In 1799 he came to London to enter at the Middle Temple. (His first lodging was at 44, George Street, Portman Square.) Very soon afterwards we find him declining a loan of money proffered him by Lady Donegal. He thanked God for the many sweet things of this kind God threw in his way, yet at that moment he was "terribly puzzled how to pay his tailor." In 1811, his friend Douglas, who had just received a large legacy, handed him a blank check, that he might fill it up for any sum he needed. "I did not accept the offer," writes Moore to his mother; "but you may guess my feelings." Yet just then he had been compelled to draw on his publisher, Power, for a sum of thirty pounds, "to be repaid partly in songs," and was sending his mother a second-day paper, which he was enabled "to purchase at rather a cheap rate." Even in 1842 he was "haunted worryingly," not knowing how to meet his son Russell's draft for one hundred pounds; and a year afterwards he utterly drained his banker to send fifty pounds to his son Tom. Once, being anxious that Bessy should have some money for the poor at Bromham, he sent a friend five pounds, requesting him to forward it to Bessy as from himself; and when urged by some thoughtless person to make a larger allowance to his son Tom, in order that he might "live like a gentleman," he writes,--"If _I_ had thought but of living like a gentleman, what would have become of my dear father and mother, of my sweet sister Nell, of my admirable Bessy's mother?" He declined to represent Limerick in Parliament, on the ground that his "circumstances were not such as to justify coming into Parliament at all, because to the labor of the day I am indebted for my daily support." His must be a miserable soul who could sneer at the poet studying how he could manage to recompense the doctor who would "take no fees," and at his amusement when Bessy was "calculating whether they could afford the expense of a fly to Devizes."

As with his mother, so with his wife. From the year 1811, the year of his marriage,[M] to that of his death, in 1852, she received from him the continual homage of a lover; away from her, no matter what were his allurements, he was ever longing to be at home. Those who love as he did wife, children, and friends will appreciate, although the worldling cannot, such commonplace sentences as these:--"Pulled some heath on Ronan's Island (Killarney) to send to my dear Bessy"; when in Italy, "got letters from my sweet Bessy, more precious to me than all the wonders I can see"; while in Paris, "sending for Bessy and my little ones; wherever they are will be home, and a happy home to me." When absent, (which was rarely for more than a week,) no matter where or in what company, seldom a day passed that he did not write a letter to Bessy. The home enjoyments, reading to her, making her the depositary of all his thoughts and hopes,--they were his deep delights, compensations for time spent amid scenes and with people who had no space in his heart. Even when in "terrible request," his thoughts and his heart were there,--in

"That dear Home, that saving Ark,
Where love's true light at last I've found,
Cheering within, when all grows dark
And comfortless and stormy round."

This is the tribute of Earl Russell to the wife of the poet Moore:--"The excellence of his wife's moral character, her energy and courage, her persevering economy, made her a better and even a richer partner to Moore than an heiress of ten thousand a year would have been, with less devotion to her duty, and less steadiness of conduct." Moore speaks of his wife's "democratic pride." It was the pride that was ever above a mean action, and which sustained him in the proud independence that marked his character from birth to death.

In March, 1846, his diary contains this sad passage:--"The last of my five children is gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relation have I in this world." His father had died in 1825; his sweet mother in 1832; "excellent Nell" in 1846; and his children one after another, three of them in youth, and two grown up to manhood,--his two boys, Tom and Russell, the first-named of whom died in Africa in 1846, an officer in the French service; the other at Sloperton in 1842, soon after his return from India, having been compelled by ill-health to resign his commission as a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth Regiment.

In 1835 the influence of Lord Lansdowne obtained for Moore a pension of three hundred pounds a year from Lord Melbourne's government,--"as due from any government, but much more from one some of the members of which are proud to think themselves your friends." The "wolf, poverty," therefore, in his latter years, did not prowl so continually about his door. But there was no fund for luxuries, none for the extra comforts that old age requires. Mrs. Moore now lives on a crown pension of one hundred pounds a year, and the interest of the sum of three thousand pounds,--the sum advanced by the ever-liberal friends of the poet, the Longmans, for the Memoirs and Journal edited by Lord John, now Earl, Russell,--a lord whom the poet dearly loved.

When his diary was published, as from time to time volumes of it appeared, slander was busy with the fame of one of the best and most upright of all the men that God ennobled by the gift of genius.[N] For my own part, I seek in vain through the eight thick volumes of that diary for any evidence that can lessen the poet in this high estimate. I find, perhaps, too many passages fitted only for the eye of love or the ear of sympathy; but I read _no one_ that shows the poet other than the devoted and loving husband, the thoughtful and affectionate parent, the considerate and generous friend.

It was said of him by Leigh Hunt, that Lord Byron summed up his character in a sentence,--"Tommy loves a lord!" Perhaps he did; but if he did, only such lords as Lansdowne and Russell were his friends. He loved also those who are "lords of humankind" in a far other sense; and, as I have shown, there is nothing in his character that stands out in higher relief than his entire _freedom from dependence_. To which of the great did he apply during seasons of difficulty approaching poverty? Which of them did he use for selfish purposes? Whose patronage among them all was profitable? To what Baael did the poet Moore ever bend the knee?

He had a large share of domestic sorrows; one after another, his five beloved children died; I have quoted his words, "We are left--alone." His admirable and devoted wife survives him. I visited, a short time ago, the home that is now desolate. If ever man was adored where adoration, so far as earth is concerned, is most to be hoped for and valued, it is in the cottage where the poet's widow lives, and will die.

Let it be inscribed on his tomb, that ever, amid privations and temptations, the allurements of grandeur and the suggestions of poverty, he preserved his self-respect; bequeathing no property, but leaving no debts; having had no "testimonial" of acknowledgment or reward,--seeking none, nay, avoiding any; making millions his debtors for intense delight, and acknowledging himself paid by the poet's meed, "the tribute of a smile"; never truckling to power; laboring ardently and honestly for his political faith, but never lending to party that which was meant for mankind; proud, and rightly proud, of his self-obtained position, but neither scorning nor slighting the humble root from which he sprang.

He was born and bred a Roman Catholic; but his creed was entirely and purely catholic. Charity was the outpouring of his heart; its pervading essence was that which he expressed in one of his Melodies,--

"Shall I ask the brave soldier who fights by my side,
In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree?
Shall I give up the friend I have valued and tried,
If he kneel not before the same altar with me?"

His children were all baptized and educated members of the Church of England. He attended the parish church, and according to the ritual of the Church of England he was buried.

It was not any outward change of religion, but homage to a purer and holier faith, that induced him to have his children baptized and brought up as members of the English Church. "For myself," he says, "my having married a Protestant wife gave me opportunity of choosing a religion, at least for my children; and if my marriage had no other advantage, I should think this quite sufficient to be grateful for."

Moore was the eloquent advocate of his country, when it was oppressed, goaded, and socially enthralled; but when time and enlightened policy removed all distinctions between the Irishman and the Englishman, between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic, his muse was silent, because content; nay, he protested in impressive verse against a continued agitation that retarded her progress, when her claims were admitted, her rights acknowledged, and her wrongs redressed.

Reference to the genius of Moore is needless. My object in this "Memory" is to offer homage to his moral and social worth. The world that obtains intense delight from his poems, and willingly acknowledges its debt to the poet, has been less ready to estimate the high and estimable character, the loving and faithful nature of the man. There are, however, many--may this humble tribute augment the number!--by whom the memory of Thomas Moore is cherished in the heart of hearts; to whom the cottage at Sloperton will be a shrine while they live,--that grave beside the village church a monument better loved than that of any other of the men of genius by whom the world is delighted, enlightened, and refined.

"That God is love," writes his friend and biographer, Earl Russell, "was the summary of his belief; that a man should love his neighbor as himself seems to have been the rule of his life." The Earl of Carlisle, inaugurating the statue of the poet,[O] bore testimony to his moral and social worth "in all the holy relations of life,--as son, as brother, as husband, as father, as friend"; and on the same occasion, Mr. O'Hagan, Q.C., thus expressed himself:--"He was faithful to all the sacred obligations and all the dear charities of domestic life,--he was the idol of a household."

Perhaps a better, though a far briefer, summary of the character of Thomas Moore than any of these may be given in the words of Dr. Parr, who bequeathed to him a ring:--

"To one who stands high in my estimation for original genius, for his exquisite sensibility, for his independent spirit, and incorruptible integrity."

FOOTNOTES:

[F] Mrs. Moore--writing to me in May, 1864--tells me I have a wrong impression as to Moore's father; that he was "handsome, full of fun, and with good manners." Moore himself calls him "one of Nature's gentlemen."

[G] Mrs. Moore write me, that I am here also wrong in my impression. "She was only a little grown out in one shoulder, but with good health; her expression was feeling, not suffering." "Dear Ellen," she adds, "was the delight of every one that knew her,--sang sweetly,--her voice very like her brother's. She died suddenly, to the grief of my loving heart."

[H] She was born in Wexford, where her father kept a "general shop." Moore used to say playfully, that he was called, in order to dignify his occupation, "a provision merchant." When on his way to Bannow in 1835 to spend a few days with his friend Thomas Boyse,--a genuine gentleman of the good old school,--he records his visit to the house of his maternal grandfather. "Nothing," he says, "could be more humble and mean than the little low house that remains to tell of his whereabouts."

I visited this house in the summer of 1864. It is still a small "general shop," situate in the old corn-market of Wexford. The rooms are more than usually quaint. Here Mrs. Moore lived until within a few weeks of the birth of her illustrious son. We are gratified to record, that, at our suggestion, a tablet has been placed over the entrance-door, stating in few words the fact that there the mother was born and lived, and that to this house the poet came, on the 26th of August, 1835, when in the zenith of his fame, to render homage to her memory. He thus writes of her and her birthplace in his "Notes" of that year:--"One of the noblest-minded, as well as most warm-hearted, of all God's creatures was born under that lowly roof."

[I] I find in Earl Russell's memoir the date given as the 26th of February; but Mrs. Moore altered it in my MSS. to February 25.

[J] Trinity College, Dublin.--Thomas Moore, son of John Moore, merchant, of Dublin, aged 14, pensioner, entered 2d June, 1794. Tutor, Dr. Burrows.

[K] Alluding to a pamphlet-letter I had printed, addressed to Repealers, when the insanity of Repeal (now happily dead) was at fever-heat.

[L] "One of them (my chief muse) was a remarkably pretty girl; when I turned round to her, as she accompanied my triumphal ear, and said, 'This is a long journey for you,' she answered, with a smile that would have done your heart good, 'Oh, I only wish, Sir, it was three hundred miles!' There's for you! What was Petrarch in the Capitol to that?"--_Journal_, &c.--This "pretty girl's" name is ----, and, strange to say, she still keeps it.

[M] Moore was married to Miss Elizabeth Dyke, at St. Martin's Church, on the 25th of March, 1811.

[N] There were two who sought to throw filth upon the poet's grave, and they were his own countrymen,--Charles Phillips and John Wilson Croker. The former had written a wretched and unmeaning pamphlet, which he suppressed when a few copies only were issued; and I am proud to believe it was in consequence of some remarks upon it written by me, for which he commenced, but subsequently abandoned, proceedings against me for libel. The atrocious attack on Moore in the "Quarterly Review" was written by John Wilson Croker. It was the old illustration of the dead lion and the living dog. Yet Croker could at that time be scarcely described as living; it was from his death-bed he shot the poisoned arrow. And what brought out the venom? Merely a few careless words of Moore's, in which he described Croker "as a scribbler of all work," words that Earl Russell would have erased, if it had occurred to him to do so. Another countryman, Thomas Crofton Croker, assailed after his death the man whose shoe-latchets he would have been proud to unloose during his life. Moreover, his earliest slanderer was also of his own country,--an author named Quin. Of a truth it has been well said, A prophet is never without honor save in his own country. The proverb is especially true as regards Irish prophets. Assuredly, Moore was, and is, more popular in every part of the world than he was or is in Ireland. The reason is plain: he was, so to speak, of two parties, yet of neither: the one could not forgive his early aspirations for liberty, uttered in imperishable verse; the other could not pardon what they called his desertion of their cause, when he saw that England was willing to do, and was doing, justice to Ireland.

[O] A bronze statue of Moore has been erected in College Street, Dublin. It is a poor affair, the production of his namesake, the sculptor. Bad as it is, it is made worse by contrast with its neighbor, Goldsmith,--a work by the great Irish artist, Foley,--a work rarely surpassed by the art of the sculptor at any period in any country.

ON BOARD THE SEVENTY-SIX

[Written for Bryant's Seventieth Birthday.]

Our ship lay tumbling in an angry sea,
Her rudder gone, her mainmast o'er the side;
Her scuppers, from the waves' clutch staggering free,
Trailed threads of priceless crimson through the tide;
Sails, shrouds, and spars with pirate cannon torn,
We lay, awaiting morn.

Awaiting morn, such morn as mocks despair;
And she that bore the promise of the world
Within her sides, now hopeless, helmless, bare,
At random o'er the wildering waters hurled;
The reek of battle drifting slow a-lee
Not sullener than we.

Morn came at last to peer into our woe,
When lo, a sail! Now surely help is nigh;
The red cross flames aloft, Christ's pledge; but no,
Her black guns grinning hate, she rushes by
And hails us:--"Gains the leak? Ah, so we thought!
Sink, then, with curses fraught!"

I leaned against my gun still angry-hot,
And my lids tingled with the tears held back;
This scorn methought was crueller than shot;
The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack,
Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly far
Than such fear-smothered war.

There our foe wallowed like a wounded brute,
The fiercer for his hurt. What now were best?
Once more tug bravely at the peril's root.
Though death come with it? Or evade the test
If right or wrong in this God's world of ours
Be leagued with higher powers?

Some, faintly loyal, felt their pulses lag
With the slow beat that doubts and then despairs;
Some, caitiff, would have struck the starry flag
That knits us with our past, and makes us heirs
Of deeds high-hearted as were ever done
'Neath the all-seeing sun.

But one there was, the Singer of our crew,
Upon whose head Age waved his peaceful sign,
But whose red heart's-blood no surrender knew;
And couchant under brows of massive line,
The eyes, like guns beneath a parapet,
Watched, charged with lightnings yet.

The voices of the hills did his obey;
The torrents flashed and tumbled in his song;
He brought our native fields from far away,
Or set us 'mid the innumerable throng
Of dateless woods, or where we heard the calm
Old homestead's evening psalm.

But now he sang of faith to things unseen,
Of freedom's birthright given to us in trust;
And words of doughty cheer he spoke between,
That made all earthly fortune seem as dust,
Matched with that duty, old as time and new,
Of being brave and true.

We, listening, learned what makes the might of words,--
Manhood to back them, constant as a star;
His voice rammed home our cannon, edged our swords,
And sent our boarders shouting; shroud and spar
Heard him and stiffened; the sails heard and wooed
The winds with loftier mood.

In our dark hour he manned our guns again;
Remanned ourselves from his own manhood's store;
Pride, honor, country throbbed through all his strain;
And shall we praise? God's praise was his before;
And on our futile laurels he looks down;
Himself our bravest crown.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

I.

Here comes the First of January, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-Five, and we are all settled comfortably into our winter places, with our winter surroundings and belongings; all cracks and openings are calked and listed, the double windows are in, the furnace dragon in the cellar is ruddy and in good liking, sending up his warming respirations through every pipe and register in the house; and yet, though an artificial summer reigns everywhere, like bees, we have our swarming-place,--in my library. There is my chimney-corner, and my table permanently established on one side of the hearth; and each of the female genus has, so to speak, pitched her own winter-tent within sight of the blaze of my camp-fire. I discerned to-day that Jennie had surreptitiously appropriated one of the drawers of my study-table to knitting-needles and worsted; and wicker work-baskets and stands of various heights and sizes seem to be planted here and there for permanence among the bookcases. The canary-bird has a sunny window, and the plants spread out their leaves and unfold their blossoms as if there were no ice and snow in the street, and Rover makes a hearth-rug of himself in winking satisfaction in front of my fire, except when Jennie is taken with a fit of discipline, when he beats a retreat, and secretes himself under my table.

Peaceable, ah, how peaceable, home and quiet and warmth in winter! And how, when we hear the wind whistle, we think of you, O our brave brothers, our saviours and defenders, who for our sake have no home but the muddy camp, the hard pillow of the barrack, the weary march, the uncertain fare,--you, the rank and file, the thousand unnoticed ones, who have left warm fires, dear wives, loving little children, without even the hope of glory or fame,--without even the hope of doing anything remarkable or perceptible for the cause you love,--resigned only to fill the ditch or bridge the chasm over which your country shall walk to peace and joy! Good men and true, brave unknown hearts, we salute you, and feel that we, in our soft peace and security, are not worthy of you! When we think of you, our simple comforts seem luxuries all too good for us, who give so little when you give all!

But there are others to whom from our bright homes, our cheerful firesides, we would fain say a word, if we dared.

Think of a mother receiving a letter with such a passage as this in it! It is extracted from one we have just seen, written by a private in the army of Sheridan, describing the death of a private. "He fell instantly, gave a peculiar smile and look, and then closed his eyes. We laid him down gently at the foot of a large tree. I crossed his hands over his breast, closed his eyelids down, but the smile was still on his face. I wrapped him in his tent, spread my pocket-handkerchief over his face, wrote his name on a piece of paper, and pinned it on his breast, and there we left him: we could not find pick or shovel to dig a grave." There it is!--a history that is multiplying itself by hundreds daily, the substance of what has come to so many homes, and must come to so many more before the great price of our ransom is paid!

What can we say to you, in those many, many homes where the light has gone out forever?--you, O fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, haunted by a name that has ceased to be spoken on earth,--you, for whom there is no more news from the camp, no more reading of lists, no more tracing of maps, no more letters, but only a blank, dead silence! The battle-cry goes on, but for you it is passed by! the victory comes, but, oh, never more to bring him back to you! your offering to this great cause has been made, and been taken; you have thrown into it _all_ your living, even all that you had, and from henceforth your house is left unto you desolate! O ye watchers of the cross, ye waiters by the sepulchre, what can be said to you? We could almost extinguish our own home-fires, that seem too bright when we think of your darkness; the laugh dies on our lip, the lamp burns dim through our tears, and we seem scarcely worthy to speak words of comfort, lest we seem as those who mock a grief they cannot know.

But is there no consolation? Is it nothing to have had such a treasure to give, and to have given it freely for the noblest cause for which ever battle was set,--for the salvation of your country, for the freedom of all mankind? Had he died a fruitless death, in the track of common life, blasted by fever, smitten or rent by crushing accident, then might his most precious life seem to be as water spilled upon the ground; but now it has been given for a cause and a purpose worthy even the anguish of your loss and sacrifice. He has been counted worthy to be numbered with those who stood with precious incense between the living and the dead, that the plague which was consuming us might be stayed. The blood of these young martyrs shall be the seed of the future church of liberty, and from every drop shall spring up flowers of healing. O widow! O mother! blessed among bereaved women! there remains to you a treasure that belongs not to those who have lost in any other wise,--the power to say, "He died for his country." In all the good that comes of this anguish you shall have a right and share by virtue of this sacrifice. The joy of freedmen bursting from chains, the glory of a nation new-born, the assurance of a triumphant future for your country and the world,--all these become yours by the purchase-money of that precious blood.

Besides this, there are other treasures that come through sorrow, and sorrow alone. There are celestial plants of root so long and so deep that the land must be torn and furrowed, ploughed up from the very foundation, before they can strike and flourish; and when we see how God's plough is driving backward and forward and across this nation, rending, tearing up tender shoots, and burying soft wild-flowers, we ask ourselves, What is He going to plant?

Not the first year, nor the second, after the ground has been broken up, does the purpose of the husbandman appear. At first we see only what is uprooted and ploughed in,--the daisy drabbled, and the violet crushed,--and the first trees planted amid the unsightly furrows stand dumb and disconsolate, irresolute in leaf, and without flower or fruit. Their work is under the ground. In darkness and silence they are putting forth long fibres, searching hither and thither under the black soil for the strength that years hence shall burst into bloom and bearing.

What is true of nations is true of individuals. It may seem now winter and desolation with you. Your hearts have been ploughed and harrowed and are now frozen up. There is not a flower left, not a blade of grass, not a bird to sing,--and it is hard to believe that any brighter flowers, any greener herbage, shall spring up, than those which have been torn away: and yet there will. Nature herself teaches you to-day. Out-doors nothing but bare branches and shrouding snow; and yet you know that there is not a tree that is not patiently holding out at the end of its boughs next year's buds, frozen indeed, but unkilled. The rhododendron and the lilac have their blossoms all ready, wrapped in cere-cloth, waiting in patient faith. Under the frozen ground the crocus and the hyacinth and the tulip hide in their hearts the perfect forms of future flowers. And it is even so with you: your leaf-buds of the future are frozen, but not killed; the soil of your heart has many flowers under it cold and still now, but they will yet come up and bloom.

The dear old book of comfort tells of no present healing for sorrow. _No_ chastening for the present seemeth joyous, but grievous, but _afterwards_ it yieldeth peaceable fruits of righteousness. We, as individuals, as a nation, need to have faith in that AFTERWARDS. It is sure to come,--sure as spring and summer to follow winter.

There is a certain amount of suffering which must follow the rending of the great chords of life, suffering which is natural and inevitable; it cannot be argued down; it cannot be stilled; it can no more be soothed by any effort of faith and reason than the pain of a fractured limb, or the agony of fire on the living flesh. All that we can do is to brace ourselves to bear it, calling on God, as the martyrs did in the fire, and resigning ourselves to let it burn on. We must be willing to suffer, since God so wills. There are just so many waves to go over us, just so many arrows of stinging thought to be shot into our soul, just so many faintings and sinkings and revivings only to suffer again, belonging to and inherent in our portion of sorrow; and there is a work of healing that God has placed in the hands of Time alone.

Time heals all things at last; yet it depends much on us in our suffering, whether time shall send us forth healed, indeed, but maimed and crippled and callous, or whether, looking to the great Physician of sorrows, and coworking with him, we come forth stronger and fairer even for our wounds.

We call ourselves a Christian people, and the peculiarity of Christianity is that it is a worship and doctrine of sorrow. The five wounds of Jesus, the instruments of the passion, the cross, the sepulchre,--these are its emblems and watchwords. In thousands of churches, amid gold and gems and altars fragrant with perfume, are seen the crown of thorns, the nails, the spear, the cup of vinegar mingled with gall, the sponge that could not slake that burning death-thirst; and in a voice choked with anguish the Church in many lands and divers tongues prays from age to age,--"By thine agony and bloody sweat, by thy cross and passion, by thy precious death and burial!"--mighty words of comfort, whose meaning reveals itself only to souls fainting in the cold death-sweat of mortal anguish! They tell all Christians that by uttermost distress alone was the Captain of their salvation made perfect as a Saviour.

Sorrow brings us into the true unity of the Church,--that unity which underlies all external creeds, and unites all hearts that have suffered deeply enough to know that when sorrow is at its utmost there is but one kind of sorrow, and but one remedy. What matter, _in extremis_, whether we be called Romanist, or Protestant, or Greek, or Calvinist?

We suffer, and Christ suffered; we die, and Christ died; he conquered suffering and death, he rose and lives and reigns,--and we shall conquer, rise, live, and reign; the hours on the cross were long, the thirst was bitter, the darkness and horror real,--_but they ended_. After the wail, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" came the calm, "It is finished"; pledge to us all that our "It is finished" shall come also.

Christ arose, fresh, joyous, no more to die; and it is written, that, when the disciples were gathered together in fear and sorrow, he stood in the midst of them, and showed unto them his hands and his side; and then were they glad. Already had the healed wounds of Jesus become pledges of consolation to innumerable thousands; and those who, like Christ, have suffered the weary struggles, the dim horrors of the cross,--who have lain, like him, cold and chilled in the hopeless sepulchre,--if his spirit wakes them to life, shall come forth with healing power for others who have suffered and are suffering.

Count the good and beautiful ministrations that have been wrought in this world of need and labor, and how many of them have been wrought by hands wounded and scarred, by hearts that had scarcely ceased to bleed!

How many priests of consolation is God now ordaining by the fiery imposition of sorrow! how many Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, Daughters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, are receiving their first vocation in tears and blood!

The report of every battle strikes into some home; and heads fall low, and hearts are shattered, and only God sees the joy that is set before them, and that shall come out of their sorrow. He sees our morning at the same moment that He sees our night,--sees us comforted, healed, risen to a higher life, at the same moment that He sees us crushed and broken in the dust; and so, though tenderer than we, He bears our great sorrows for the joy that is set before us.

After the Napoleonic wars had desolated Europe, the country was, like all countries after war, full of shattered households, of widows and orphans and homeless wanderers. A nobleman of Silesia, the Baron von Kottwitz, who had lost his wife and all his family in the reverses and sorrows of the times, found himself alone in the world, which looked more dreary and miserable through the multiplying lenses of his own tears. But he was one of those whose heart had been quickened in its death anguish by the resurrection voice of Christ; and he came forth to life and comfort. He bravely resolved to do all that one man could to lessen the great sum of misery. He sold his estates in Silesia, bought in Berlin a large building that had been used as barracks for the soldiers, and, fitting it up in plain commodious apartments, formed there a great family-establishment, into which he received the wrecks and fragments of families that had been broken up by the war,--orphan children, widowed and helpless women, decrepit old people, disabled soldiers. These he mad his family, and constituted himself their father and chief. He above with them, and cared for them as a parent. He had schools for the children; the more advanced he put to trades and employments; he set up a hospital for the sick; and for all he had the priestly ministrations of his own Christ-like heart. The celebrated Professor Tholuck, one of the most learned men of modern Germany, was an early _protege_ of the old Baron's, who, discerning his talents, put him in the way of a liberal education. In his earlier years, like many others of the young who play with life, ignorant of its needs, Tholuck piqued himself on a lordly skepticism with regard to the commonly received Christianity, and even wrote an essay to prove the superiority of the Mohammedan to the Christian religion. In speaking of his conversion, he says,--"What moved me was no argument, nor any spoken reproof, but simply that divine image of the old Baron walking before my soul. That life was an argument always present to me, and which I never could answer; and so I became a Christian." In the life of this man we see the victory over sorrow. How many with means like his, when desolated by like bereavements, have lain coldly and idly gazing on the miseries of life, and weaving around themselves icy tissues of doubt and despair,--doubting the being of a God, doubting the reality of a Providence, doubting the divine love, embittered and rebellious against the power which they could not resist, yet to which they would not submit! In such a chill heart-freeze lies the danger of sorrow. And it is a mortal danger. It is a torpor that must be resisted, as the man in the whirling snows must bestir himself, or he will perish. The apathy of melancholy must be broken by an effort of religion and duty. The stagnant blood must be made to flow by active work, and the cold hand warmed by clasping the hands outstretched towards it in sympathy or supplication. One orphan child taken in, to be fed, clothed, and nurtured, may save a heart from freezing to death: and God knows this war is making but too many orphans!

It is easy to subscribe to an orphan asylum, and go on in one's despair and loneliness. Such ministries may do good to the children who are thereby saved from the street, but they impart little warmth and comfort to the giver. One destitute child housed, taught, cared for, and tended personally, will bring more solace to a suffering heart than a dozen maintained in an asylum. Not that the child will probably prove an angel, or even an uncommonly interesting mortal. It is a prosaic work, this bringing-up of children, and there can be little rosewater in it. The child may not appreciate what is done for him, may not be particularly grateful, may have disagreeable faults, and continue to have them after much pains on your part to eradicate them,--and yet it is a fact, that to redeem one human being from destitution and ruin, even in some homely every-day course of ministrations, is one of the best possible tonics and alteratives to a sick and wounded spirit.

But this is not the only avenue to beneficence which the war opens. We need but name the service of hospitals, the care and education of the freedmen,--for these are charities that have long been before the eyes of the community, and have employed thousands of busy hands: thousands of sick and dying beds to tend, a race to be educated, civilized, and Christianized, surely were work enough for one age; and yet this is not all. War shatters everything, and it is hard to say what in society will not need rebuilding and binding up and strengthening anew. Not the least of the evils of war are the vices which a great army engenders wherever it moves,--vices peculiar to military life, as others are peculiar to peace. The poor soldier perils for us not merely his body, but his soul. He leads a life of harassing and exhausting toil and privation, of violent strain on the nervous energies, alternating with sudden collapse, creating a craving for stimulants, and endangering the formation of fatal habits. What furies and harpies are those that follow the army, and that seek out the soldier in his tent, far from home, mother, wife, and sister, tired, disheartened, and tempt him to forget his troubles in a momentary exhilaration, that burns only to chill and to destroy! Evil angels are always active and indefatigable, and there must be good angels enlisted to face them; and here is employment for the slack hand of grief. Ah, we have known mothers bereft of sons in this war, who have seemed at once to open wide their hearts, and to become mothers to every brave soldier in the field. They have lived only to work,--and in place of one lost, their sons have been counted by thousands.

And not least of all the fields for exertion and Christian charity opened by this war is that presented by womanhood. The war is abstracting from the community its protecting and sheltering elements, and leaving the helpless and dependent in vast disproportion. For years to come, the average of lone women will be largely increased; and the demand, always great, for some means by which they may provide for themselves, in the rude jostle of the world, will become more urgent and imperative.

Will any one sit pining away in inert grief, when two streets off are the midnight dance-houses, where girls of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen are being lured into the way of swift destruction? How many of these are daughters of soldiers who have given their hearts' blood for us and our liberties!

Two noble women of the Society of Friends have lately been taking the gauge of suffering and misery in our land, visiting the hospitals at every accessible point, pausing in our great cities, and going in their purity to those midnight orgies where mere children are being trained for a life of vice and infamy. They have talked with these poor bewildered souls, entangled in toils as terrible and inexorable as those of the slave-market, and many of whom are frightened and distressed at the life they are beginning to lead, and earnestly looking for the means of escape. In the judgment of these holy women, at least one third of those with whom they have talked are children so recently entrapped, and so capable of reformation, that there would be the greatest hope in efforts for their salvation. While such things are to be done in our land, is there any reason why any one should die of grief? One soul redeemed will do more to lift the burden of sorrow than all the blandishments and diversions of art, all the alleviations of luxury, all the sympathy of friends.

In the Roman Catholic Church there is an order of women called the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who have renounced the world to devote themselves, their talents and property, entirely to the work of seeking out and saving the fallen of their own sex; and the wonders worked by their self-denying love on the hearts and lives of even the most depraved are credible only to those who know that the Good Shepherd Himself ever lives and works with such spirits engaged in such a work. A similar order of women exists in New York, under the direction of the Episcopal Church, in connection with St. Luke's Hospital; and another in England, who tend the "House of Mercy" of Clewer.

Such benevolent associations offer objects of interest to that class which most needs something to fill the void made by bereavement. The wounds of grief are less apt to find a cure in that rank of life where the sufferer has wealth and leisure. The _poor_ widow, whose husband was her all, _must_ break the paralysis of grief. The hard necessities of life are her physicians; they send her out to unwelcome, yet friendly toil, which, hard as it seems, has yet its healing power. But the sufferer surrounded by the appliances of wealth and luxury may long indulge the baleful apathy, and remain in the damp shadows of the valley of death till strength and health are irrecoverably lost. How Christ-like is the thought of a woman, graceful, elegant, cultivated, refined, whose voice has been trained to melody, whose fingers can make sweet harmony with every touch, whose pencil and whose needle can awake the beautiful creations of art, devoting all these powers to the work of charming back to the sheepfold those wandering and bewildered lambs whom the Good Shepherd still calls his own! Jenny Lind, once, when she sang at a concert for destitute children, exclaimed in her enthusiasm, "Is it not beautiful that I can sing so?" And so may not every woman feel, when her graces and accomplishments draw the wanderer, and charm away evil demons, and soothe the sore and sickened spirit, and make the Christian fold more attractive than the dizzy gardens of false pleasure?

In such associations, and others of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.

So the beginning of this eventful 1865, which finds us still treading the wine-press of our great conflict, should bring with it a serene and solemn hope, a joy such as those had with whom in the midst of the fiery furnace there walked one like unto the Son of God.

The great affliction that has come upon our country is so evidently the purifying chastening of a Father, rather than the avenging anger of a Destroyer, that all hearts may submit themselves in a solemn and holy calm still to bear the burning that shall make us clean from dross and bring us forth to a higher national life. Never, in the whole course of our history, have such teachings of the pure abstract Right been so commended and forced upon us by Providence. Never have public men been so constrained to humble themselves before God, and to acknowledge that there is a Judge that ruleth in the earth. Verily His inquisition for blood has been strict and awful; and for every stricken household of the poor and lowly, hundreds of households of the oppressor have been scattered. The land where the family of the slave was first annihilated, and the negro, with all the loves and hopes of a man, was proclaimed to be a beast to be bred and sold in market with the horse and the swine,--that land, with its fair name, Virginia, has been made a desolation so signal, so wonderful, that the blindest passer-by cannot but ask for what sin so awful a doom has been meted out. The prophetic visions of Nat Turner, who saw the leaves drop blood and the land darkened, have been fulfilled. The work of justice which he predicted is being executed to the uttermost.

But when this strange work of judgment and justice is consummated, when our country, through a thousand battles and ten thousands of precious deaths, shall have come forth from this long agony, redeemed and regenerated, then God Himself shall return and dwell with us, and the Lord God shall wipe away all tears from all faces, and the rebuke of His people shall He utterly take away.

GOD SAVE THE FLAG!

Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming,
Snatched from the altars of insolent foes,
Burning with star-fires, but never consuming,
Flash its broad ribands of lily and rose.

Vainly the prophets of Baael would rend it,
Vainly his worshippers pray for its fall;
Thousands have died for it, millions defend it,
Emblem of justice and mercy to all:

Justice that reddens the sky with her terrors,
Mercy that comes with her white-handed train,
Soothing all passions, redeeming all errors,
Sheathing the sabre and breaking the chain.

Borne on the deluge of old usurpations,
Drifted our Ark o'er the desolate seas;
This was the rainbow of hope to the nations,
Torn from the storm-cloud and flung to the breeze!

God bless the Flag and its loyal defenders.
While its broad folds o'er the battle-field wave,
Till the dim star-wreath rekindle its splendors,
Washed from its stains in the blood of the brave!