The Last Man
relieved her. We had for many years trod the highway of life hand in
hand, and still thus linked, we might step within the shades of death;
but her children, her lovely, playful, animated children—beings sprung
from her own dear side—portions of her own being—depositories of our
loves—even if we died, it would be comfort to know that they ran man’s
accustomed course. But it would not be so; young and blooming as they
were, they would die, and from the hopes of maturity, from the proud
name of attained manhood, they were cut off for ever. Often with
maternal affection she had figured their merits and talents exerted on
life’s wide stage. Alas for these latter days! The world had grown old,
and all its inmates partook of the decrepitude. Why talk of infancy,
manhood, and old age? We all stood equal sharers of the last throes of
time-worn nature. Arrived at the same point of the world’s age—there
was no difference in us; the name of parent and child had lost their
meaning; young boys and girls were level now with men. This was all
true; but it was not less agonizing to take the admonition home.
Where could we turn, and not find a desolation pregnant with the dire
lesson of example? The fields had been left uncultivated, weeds and
gaudy flowers sprung up,—or where a few wheat-fields shewed signs of
the living hopes of the husbandman, the work had been left halfway, the
ploughman had died beside the plough; the horses had deserted the
furrow, and no seedsman had approached the dead; the cattle unattended
wandered over the fields and through the lanes; the tame inhabitants of
the poultry yard, baulked of their daily food, had become wild—young
lambs were dropt in flower-gardens, and the cow stalled in the hall of
pleasure. Sickly and few, the country people neither went out to sow
nor reap; but sauntered about the meadows, or lay under the hedges,
when the inclement sky did not drive them to take shelter under the
nearest roof. Many of those who remained, secluded themselves; some had
laid up stores which should prevent the necessity of leaving their
homes;—some deserted wife and child, and imagined that they secured
their safety in utter solitude. Such had been Ryland’s plan, and he was
discovered dead and half-devoured by insects, in a house many miles
from any other, with piles of food laid up in useless superfluity.
Others made long journies to unite themselves to those they loved, and
arrived to find them dead.
London did not contain above a thousand inhabitants; and this number
was continually diminishing. Most of them were country people, come up
for the sake of change; the Londoners had sought the country. The busy
eastern part of the town was silent, or at most you saw only where,
half from cupidity, half from curiosity, the warehouses had been more
ransacked than pillaged: bales of rich India goods, shawls of price,
jewels, and spices, unpacked, strewed the floors. In some places the
possessor had to the last kept watch on his store, and died before the
barred gates. The massy portals of the churches swung creaking on their
hinges; and some few lay dead on the pavement. The wretched female,
loveless victim of vulgar brutality, had wandered to the toilet of
high-born beauty, and, arraying herself in the garb of splendour, had
died before the mirror which reflected to herself alone her altered
appearance. Women whose delicate feet had seldom touched the earth in
their luxury, had fled in fright and horror from their homes, till,
losing themselves in the squalid streets of the metropolis, they had
died on the threshold of poverty. The heart sickened at the variety of
misery presented; and, when I saw a specimen of this gloomy change, my
soul ached with the fear of what might befall my beloved Idris and my
babes. Were they, surviving Adrian and myself, to find themselves
protectorless in the world? As yet the mind alone had suffered—could I
for ever put off the time, when the delicate frame and shrinking nerves
of my child of prosperity, the nursling of rank and wealth, who was my
companion, should be invaded by famine, hardship, and disease? Better
die at once—better plunge a poinard in her bosom, still untouched by
drear adversity, and then again sheathe it in my own! But, no; in times
of misery we must fight against our destinies, and strive not to be
overcome by them. I would not yield, but to the last gasp resolutely
defended my dear ones against sorrow and pain; and if I were vanquished
at last, it should not be ingloriously. I stood in the gap, resisting
the enemy—the impalpable, invisible foe, who had so long besieged us—as
yet he had made no breach: it must be my care that he should not,
secretly undermining, burst up within the very threshold of the temple
of love, at whose altar I daily sacrificed. The hunger of Death was now
stung more sharply by the diminution of his food: or was it that
before, the survivors being many, the dead were less eagerly counted?
Now each life was a gem, each human breathing form of far, O! far more
worth than subtlest imagery of sculptured stone; and the daily, nay,
hourly decrease visible in our numbers, visited the heart with
sickening misery. This summer extinguished our hopes, the vessel of
society was wrecked, and the shattered raft, which carried the few
survivors over the sea of misery, was riven and tempest tost. Man
existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep, and
wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet
more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean; man, the
queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of
demi-gods, existed no longer.
Farewell to the patriotic scene, to the love of liberty and well earned
meed of virtuous aspiration!—farewell to crowded senate, vocal with the
councils of the wise, whose laws were keener than the sword blade
tempered at Damascus!—farewell to kingly pomp and warlike pageantry;
the crowns are in the dust, and the wearers are in their
graves!—farewell to the desire of rule, and the hope of victory; to
high vaulting ambition, to the appetite for praise, and the craving for
the suffrage of their fellows! The nations are no longer! No senate
sits in council for the dead; no scion of a time honoured dynasty pants
to rule over the inhabitants of a charnel house; the general’s hand is
cold, and the soldier has his untimely grave dug in his native fields,
unhonoured, though in youth. The market-place is empty, the candidate
for popular favour finds none whom he can represent. To chambers of
painted state farewell!—To midnight revelry, and the panting emulation
of beauty, to costly dress and birth-day shew, to title and the gilded
coronet, farewell!
Farewell to the giant powers of man,—to knowledge that could pilot the
deep-drawing bark through the opposing waters of shoreless ocean,—to
science that directed the silken balloon through the pathless air,—to
the power that could put a barrier to mighty waters, and set in motion
wheels, and beams, and vast machinery, that could divide rocks of
granite or marble, and make the mountains plain!
Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence, which is to the human mind as the
winds to the sea, stirring, and then allaying it;—farewell to poetry
and deep philosophy, for man’s imagination is cold, and his enquiring
mind can no longer expatiate on the wonders of life, for “there is no
work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou
goest!”—to the graceful building, which in its perfect proportion
transcended the rude forms of nature, the fretted gothic and massy
saracenic pile, to the stupendous arch and glorious dome, the fluted
column with its capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle and
fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical
concord to the ear!—farewell to sculpture, where the pure marble mocks
human flesh, and in the plastic expression of the culled excellencies
of the human shape, shines forth the god!—farewell to painting, the
high wrought sentiment and deep knowledge of the artists’s mind in
pictured canvas—to paradisaical scenes, where trees are ever vernal,
and the ambrosial air rests in perpetual glow:—to the stamped form of
tempest, and wildest uproar of universal nature encaged in the narrow
frame, O farewell! Farewell to music, and the sound of song; to the
marriage of instruments, where the concord of soft and harsh unites in
sweet harmony, and gives wings to the panting listeners, whereby to
climb heaven, and learn the hidden pleasures of the eternals!—Farewell
to the well-trod stage; a truer tragedy is enacted on the world’s ample
scene, that puts to shame mimic grief: to high-bred comedy, and the low
buffoon, farewell!—Man may laugh no more. Alas! to enumerate the
adornments of humanity, shews, by what we have lost, how supremely
great man was. It is all over now. He is solitary; like our first
parents expelled from Paradise, he looks back towards the scene he has
quitted. The high walls of the tomb, and the flaming sword of plague,
lie between it and him. Like to our first parents, the whole earth is
before him, a wide desart. Unsupported and weak, let him wander through
fields where the unreaped corn stands in barren plenty, through copses
planted by his fathers, through towns built for his use. Posterity is
no more; fame, and ambition, and love, are words void of meaning; even
as the cattle that grazes in the field, do thou, O deserted one, lie
down at evening-tide, unknowing of the past, careless of the future,
for from such fond ignorance alone canst thou hope for ease!
Joy paints with its own colours every act and thought. The happy do not
feel poverty—for delight is as a gold-tissued robe, and crowns them
with priceless gems. Enjoyment plays the cook to their homely fare, and
mingles intoxication with their simple drink. Joy strews the hard couch
with roses, and makes labour ease.
Sorrow doubles the burthen to the bent-down back; plants thorns in the
unyielding pillow; mingles gall with water; adds saltness to their
bitter bread; cloathing them in rags, and strewing ashes on their bare
heads. To our irremediable distress every small and pelting
inconvenience came with added force; we had strung our frames to endure
the Atlean weight thrown on us; we sank beneath the added feather
chance threw on us, “the grasshopper was a burthen.” Many of the
survivors had been bred in luxury—their servants were gone, their
powers of command vanished like unreal shadows: the poor even suffered
various privations; and the idea of another winter like the last,
brought affright to our minds. Was it not enough that we must die, but
toil must be added?—must we prepare our funeral repast with labour, and
with unseemly drudgery heap fuel on our deserted hearths —must we with
servile hands fabricate the garments, soon to be our shroud?
Not so! We are presently to die, let us then enjoy to its full relish
the remnant of our lives. Sordid care, avaunt! menial labours, and
pains, slight in themselves, but too gigantic for our exhausted
strength, shall make no part of our ephemeral existences. In the
beginning of time, when, as now, man lived by families, and not by
tribes or nations, they were placed in a genial clime, where earth fed
them untilled, and the balmy air enwrapt their reposing limbs with
warmth more pleasant than beds of down. The south is the native place
of the human race; the land of fruits, more grateful to man than the
hard-earned Ceres of the north,—of trees, whose boughs are as a
palace-roof, of couches of roses, and of the thirst-appeasing grape. We
need not there fear cold and hunger.
Look at England! the grass shoots up high in the meadows; but they are
dank and cold, unfit bed for us. Corn we have none, and the crude