From Chaucer to Tennyson
from behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their
soft liquid laughter--but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious
eye they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe that
their voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose
themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from
the topmost bough. Not a grove with measured grass or rolled gravel for
you to tread upon, but with narrow, hollow-shaped earthy paths, edged
with faint dashes of delicate moss--paths which look as if they were
made by the free will of the trees and underwood, moving reverently
aside to look at the tall queen of the white-footed nymphs.
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of
themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but
there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only
of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty
like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling
noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to
engage in conscious mischief--a beauty with which you can never be
angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the
state of mind into which it throws you....It is of little use for me to
tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played
about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness
under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back
under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate
rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears; it is of
little use for me to say how lovely was the contour of her
pink-and-white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-colored stuff
bodice, or how the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a
thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such
charming lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-soled buckled shoes
lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when empty
of her foot and ankle--of little use unless you have seen a woman who
affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you
might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she would not in the least
resemble that distracting kitten-like maiden. I might mention all the
divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life
utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after the mounting
lark, or in wandering through the still lanes when the fresh-opened
blossoms fill them with a sacred, silent beauty like that of fretted
aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive catalogue? I could
never make you know what I meant by a bright spring day. Hetty's was a
spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things,
round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of
innocence--the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that,
being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe
steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the
middle of a bog.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great
tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us
by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and
ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every
movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the
thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from
us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the
air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years
ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage--the mechanical
instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the
modeling hand--galls us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors. The
long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own
wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humors and
irrational persistence.
It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after life--the
time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by
a slight something--a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or
an eyelid--that she is at least beginning to love him in return....So
unless our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory, we can never
recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or
rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up
into our nature, or as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up
into the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our
imagination as we can only _believe_ in the joy of childhood. But the
first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to
the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as
the recurrent sensation of a sweet odor breathed in a far-off hour of
happiness. It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to
tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last
keenness to the agony of despair.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
MIDNIGHT IN THE CITY.
[From _Sartor Resartus_.]
"_Ach, mein Lieber!_" said he once, at midnight, when we had returned
from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to
dwell here. These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up through smoke and
thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of night,
what thinks Booetes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith
in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when
Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still
rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls
roofed-in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and
Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad: that hum, I
say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in
Heaven! O, under that hideous coverlet of vapours and putrefactions and
unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The
joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being
born: men are praying,--on the other side of a brick partition men are
cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee
still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask
curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers
hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure cellars,
_Rouge-et-Noir_ languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, hungry
Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting, and playing their
high chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his
mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides
down to fly with him over the borders: the Thief, still more silently,
sets-to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen
first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and
dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts;
but, in the Condemned Cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and
faint, and blood-shot eyes look out through the darkness, which is
around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men
are to be hanged on the morrow: comes no hammering from the
_Rabenstein_?--their gallows must even now be o' building. Upward of
five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us
in horizontal positions; their heads all in night-caps and full of the
foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his
rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her
pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten.--All
these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry
and masonry between them;--crammed in, like salted fish in their
barrel;--or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed
Vipers, each struggling to get its _head above_ the other: _such_ work
goes on under that smoke-counterpane!--But I, _mein Werther,_ sit above
it all; I am alone with the Stars."
GHOSTS.
[From the Same.]
Again, could any thing be more miraculous than an actual authentic
Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life to see one; but could
not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and
tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as
well as with the body's, look around him into that full tide of human
Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into himself? The good
Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish;
well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side.
Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the
threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we?
Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and
that fade away again into air, and Invisibility? This is no metaphor,
it is a simple scientific _fact_: we start out of Nothingness, take
figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is
Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not
tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song
of beatified souls? And again, do not we squeak and gibber (in our
discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide
bodeful and feeble and fearful; or uproar (_poltern_), and revel in our
mad Dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning-air summons us to
our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is
Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce
battle-shouts, at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all
vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his
Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the
veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made
Night hideous, flitted away?--Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million
walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished
from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks
once....
Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's
Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in
long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus,
like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the
Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again
into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up,
in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist
Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some
foot-print of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read
traces of the earliest Van. But whence?--O Heaven, whither? Sense knows
not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from
God and to God.
"We _are such stuff_
As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep!"
ALFRED TENNYSON.
THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE.
[From _The Princess_.]
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more....
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,