As nothing which is impassioned escapes the eye of poetry, neither has
this escaped it--that there is, or may be, through solitude, 'sublime
attractions of the grave.' But even poetry has not perceived that these
attractions may arise for a child. Not, indeed, a passion for the grave
_as_ the grave--from _that_ a child revolts; but a passion for the grave
as the portal through which it may recover some heavenly countenance,
mother or sister, that has vanished. Through solitude this passion may
be exalted into a frenzy like a nympholepsy. At first, when in childhood
we find ourselves torn away from the lips that we could hang on for
ever, we throw out our arms in vain struggles to snatch at them, and
pull them back again. But when we have felt for a time how hopeless is
that effort, and that they cannot come to _us_, we desist from that
struggle, and next we whisper to our hearts, Might not we go to _them_?
Such in principle and origin was the famous _Dulce Domum_[4] of the
English schoolboy. Such is the _Heimweh_ (home-sickness) of the German
and Swiss soldier in foreign service. Such is the passion of the
Calenture. Doubtless, reader, you have seen it described. The poor
sailor is in tropical latitudes; deep, breathless calms have prevailed
for weeks. Fever and delirium are upon him. Suddenly from his restless
hammock he starts up; he will fret no longer in darkness; he ascends
upon deck. How motionless are the deeps! How vast--how sweet are these
shining zaarrahs of water! He gazes, and slowly under the blazing
scenery of his brain the scenery of his eye unsettles. The waters are
swallowed up; the seas have disappeared. Green fields appear, a silent
dell, and a pastoral cottage. Two faces appear--are at the door--sweet
female faces, and behold they beckon him. 'Come to us!' they seem to
say. The picture rises to his wearied brain like a _sanctus_ from the
choir of a cathedral, and in the twinkling of an eye, stung to madness
by the cravings of his heart, the man is overboard. He is gone--he is
lost for this world; but if he missed the arms of the lovely women--wife
and sister--whom he sought, assuredly he has settled into arms that are
mightier and not less indulgent.
I, young as I was, had one feeling not learned from books, and that
_could_ not have been learned from books, the deepest of all that
connect themselves with natural scenery. It is the feeling which in 'The
Hart-leap Well' of Wordsworth, in his 'Danish Boy,' and other exquisite
poems is brought out, viz., the breathless, mysterious, Pan-like silence
that haunts the noon-day. If there were winds abroad, then I was roused
myself into sympathetic tumults. But if this dead silence haunted the
air, then the peace which was in nature echoed another peace which lay
in graves, and I fell into a sick languishing for things which a voice
from heaven seemed to say '_cannot_ be granted.'
There is a German superstition, which eight or ten years after I read,
of the Erl-king and his daughter. The daughter had power to tempt
infants away into the invisible world; but it is, as the reader
understands, by collusion with some infirmity of sick desire for such
worlds in the infant itself.
'Who is that rides through the forest so fast?'
It is a knight who carries his infant upon his saddle-bow. The
Erl-king's daughter rides by his side; and, in words audible only when
she means them to be heard, she says:
'If thou wilt, dear baby, with me go away,
We will see a fine show, we will play a fine play.'
That sounds lovely to my ears. Oh yes, that collusion with dim sleeping
infancy is lovely to me; but I was too advanced in intellect to have
been tempted by _such_ temptations. Still there was a perilous
attraction for me in worlds that slept and rested; and if the Erl-king's
daughter had revealed herself to my perceptions, there was one 'show'
that she might have promised which would have wiled me away with her
into the dimmest depths of the mightiest and remotest forests.
3.--WHO IS THIS WOMAN THAT BECKONETH AND WARNETH ME FROM THE PLACE WHERE
SHE IS, AND IN WHOSE EYES IS WOEFUL REMEMBRANCE? I GUESS WHO SHE IS.
In my dreams were often prefigurements of my future, as I could not but
read the signs. What man has not some time in dewy morn, or sequestered
eve, or in the still night-watches, when deep sleep falleth on other men
but visiteth not his weary eyelids--what man, I say, has not some time
hushed his spirit and questioned with himself whether some things seen
or obscurely felt, were not anticipated as by mystic foretaste in some
far halcyon time, post-natal or ante-natal he knew not; only assuredly
he knew that for him past and present and future merged in one awful
moment of lightning revelation. Oh, spirit that dwelleth in man, how
subtle are _thy_ revelations; how deep, how delirious the raptures thou
canst inspire; how poignant the stings with which thou canst pierce the
heart; how sweet the honey with which thou assuagest the wound; how dark
the despairs and accusings that lie behind thy curtains, and leap upon
us like lightning from the cloud, with the sense as of some heavenly
blazoning, and oftentimes carry us beyond ourselves!
It is a sweet morning in June, and the fragrance of the roses is wafted
towards me as I move--for I am walking in a lawny meadow, still wet
with dew--and a wavering mist lies over the distance. Suddenly it seems
to lift, and out of the dewy dimness emerges a cottage, embowered with
roses and clustering clematis; and the hills, in which it is set like a
gem, are tree-clad, and rise billowy behind it, and to the right and to
the left are glistening expanses of water. Over the cottage there hangs
a halo, as if clouds had but parted there. From the door of that cottage
emerges a figure, the countenance full of the trepidation of some dread
woe feared or remembered. With waving arm and tearful uplifted face the
figure first beckons me onward, and then, when I have advanced some
yards, frowning, warns me away. As I still continue to advance, despite
the warning, darkness falls: figure, cottage, hills, trees, and halo
fade and disappear; and all that remains to me is the look on the face
of her that beckoned and warned me away. I read that glance as by the
inspiration of a moment. We had been together; together we had entered
some troubled gulf; struggled together, suffered together. Was it as
lovers torn asunder by calamity? was it as combatants forced by bitter
necessity into bitter feud, when we only, in all the world, yearned for
peace together? Oh, what a searching glance was that which she cast on
me! as if she, being now in the spiritual world, abstracted from flesh,
remembered things that I could not remember. Oh, how I shuddered as the
sweet sunny eyes in the sweet sunny morning of June--the month that was
my 'angelical'; half spring, yet with summer dress, that to me was very
'angelical'--seemed reproachfully to challenge in me recollections of
things passed thousands of years ago (old indeed, yet that were made new
again for us, because now first it was that we met again). Oh, heavens!
it came over me as doth the raven over the infected house, as from a bed
of violets sweeps the saintly odour of corruption. What a glimpse was
thus revealed! glory in despair, as of that gorgeous vegetation that hid
the sterilities of the grave in the tropics of that summer long ago; of
that heavenly beauty which slept side by side within my sister's coffin
in the month of June; of those saintly swells that rose from an infinite
distance--I know not whether to or from my sister. Could this be a
memorial of that nature? Are the nearer and more distant stages of life
thus dimly connected, and the connection hidden, but suddenly revealed
for a moment?
This lady for years appeared to me in dreams; in that, considering the
electric character of my dreams, and that they were far less like a lake
reflecting the heavens than like the pencil of some mighty artist--Da
Vinci or Michael Angelo--that cannot copy in simplicity, but comments in
freedom, while reflecting in fidelity, there was nothing to surprise.
But a change in this appearance was remarkable. Oftentimes, after eight
years had passed, she appeared in summer dawn at a window. It was a
window that opened on a balcony. This feature only gave a distinction, a
refinement, to the aspect of the cottage--else all was simplicity.
Spirit of Peace, dove-like dawn that slept upon the cottage, ye were not
broken by any participation in my grief and despair! For ever the vision
of that cottage was renewed. Did I roam in the depths of sweet pastoral
solitudes in the West, with the tinkling of sheep-bells in my ears, a
rounded hillock, seen vaguely, would shape itself into a cottage; and at
the door my monitory, regretful Hebe would appear. Did I wander by the
seashore, one gently-swelling wave in the vast heaving plain of waters
would suddenly transform itself into a cottage, and I, by some
involuntary inward impulse, would in fancy advance toward it.
Ah, reader, you will think this which I am going to say too near, too
holy, for recital. But not so. The deeper a woe touches me in heart, so
much the more am I urged to recite it. The world disappears: I see only
the grand reliques of a world--memorials of a love that has departed,
has been--the record of a sorrow that is, and has its greyness converted
into verdure--monuments of a wrath that has been reconciled, of a wrong
that has been atoned for--convulsions of a storm that has gone by. What
I am going to say is the most like a superstitious thing that I ever
shall say. And I have reason to think that every man who is not a
villain once in his life must be superstitious. It is a tribute which he
pays to human frailty, which tribute if he will not pay, which frailty
if he will not share, then also he shall not have any of its strength.
The face of this monitory Hebe haunted me for some years in a way that I
must faintly attempt to explain. It is little to say that it was the
sweetest face, with the most peculiar expression of sweetness, that I
had ever seen: that was much, but that was earthly. There was something
more terrific, believe me, than this; yet that was not the word: terror
looks to the future; and this perhaps did, but not primarily. Chiefly it
looked at some unknown past, and was for that reason awful; yes,
awful--that was the word.
Thus, on any of those heavenly sunny mornings, that now are buried in an
endless grave, did I, transported by no human means, enter that cottage,
and descend to that breakfast-room, my earliest salute was to her, that
ever, as the look of pictures do, with her eyes pursued me round the
room, and oftentimes with a subtle checking of grief, as if great sorrow
had been or would be hers. And it was, too, in the sweet Maytime. Oh
yes; she was but as if she had been--as if it were her original ...
chosen to have been the aurora of a heavenly clime; and then suddenly
she was as one of whom, for some thousand years, Paradise had received
no report; then, again, as if she entered the gates of Paradise not less
innocent; and, again, as if she could not enter; and some blame--but I
knew not what blame--was mine; and now she looked as though broken with
a woe that no man could read, as she sought to travel back to her early
joy--yet no longer a joy that is sublime in innocency, but a joy from
which sprung abysses of memories polluted into anguish, till her tears
seemed to be suffused with drops of blood. All around was peace and the
deep silence of untroubled solitude; only in the lovely lady was a sign
of horror, that had slept, under deep ages of frost, in her heart, and
now rose, as with the rushing of wings, to her face. Could it be
supposed that one life--so pitiful a thing--was what moved her care? Oh
no; it was, or it seemed, as if this poor wreck of a life happened to be
that one which determined the fate of some thousand others. Nothing
less; nothing so abject as one poor fifty years--nothing less than a
century of centuries could have stirred the horror that rose to her
lovely lips, as once more she waved me away from the cottage.
Oh, reader, five years after I saw that sweet face in reality--saw it in
the flesh; saw that pomp of womanhood; saw that cottage; saw a thousand
times that lovely domicile that heard the cooing of the solitary dove in
the solitary morning; saw the grace of childhood and the shadows of
graves that lay, like creatures asleep, in the sunshine; saw, also, the
horror, somehow realized as a shadowy reflection from myself, which
warned me off from that cottage, and which still rings through the
dreams of five-and-twenty years.
The general sentiment or sense of pre-existence, of which this
_Suspiria_ may be regarded as one significant and affecting
illustration, had this record in the outset of the 'Reminiscences of
Wordsworth':
'Oh, sense of mysterious pre-existence, by which, through years, in
which as yet a stranger to those valleys of Westmoreland, I viewed
myself as a phantom self--a second identity projected from my own
consciousness, and already living amongst them--how was it, and by what
prophetic instinct, that already I said to myself oftentimes, when
chasing day-dreams along the pictures of these wild mountainous
labyrinths, which as yet I had not traversed, "Here, in some distant
year, I shall be shaken with love, and there with stormiest grief and
regret"? Whence was it that sudden revelations came upon me, like the
drawings up of a curtain, and closing again as rapidly, of scenes that
made the future heaven of my life? And how was it that in thought I
_was_, and yet in reality _was not_, a denizen, already, in 1803, 1804,
1805, of lakes and forest lawns, which I never saw till 1807? and that,
by a prophetic instinct of heart, I rehearsed and lived over, as it
were, in vision those chapters of my life which have carried with them
the weightiest burden of joy and sorrow, and by the margin of those very
lakes and hills with which I prefigured this connection? and, in short,
that for me, by a transcendent privilege, during the novitiate of my
life, most truly I might say:
'"In to-day already walked to-morrow."'