"But he is weak--both man and boy
Has been an idler in the land."--WORDSWORTH.
I was attempting to listen, on the evening of the following Sunday, to a
dull, listless discourse--one of the discourses so common at this
period, in which there was fine writing without genius, and fine
religion without Christianity--when a person who had just taken his
place beside me, tapped me on the shoulder, and thrust a letter into my
hand. It was my newly-acquired friend of the previous evening; and we
shook hands heartily under the pew.
"That letter has just been handed me by an acquaintance from your part
of the country," he whispered; "I trust it contains nothing unpleasant."
I raised it to the light, and on ascertaining that it was sealed and
edged with black, rose and quitted the church, followed by my friend. It
intimated, in two brief lines that my patron, the baronet, had been
killed by a fall from his horse a few evenings before; and that, dying
intestate the allowance which had hitherto enabled me to prosecute my
studies necessarily dropped. I crumpled up the paper in my hand.
"You have learned something very unpleasant," said Ferguson. "Pardon
me--I have no wish to intrude; but, if at all agreeable, I would fain
spend the evening with you."
My heart filled, and grasping his hand, I briefly intimated the purport
of the communication, and we walked out together in the direction of the
ruins.
"It is, perhaps, as hard, Mr. Ferguson," I said, "to fall from one's
hopes as from the place to which they pointed. I was ambitious--too
ambitious, it may be--to rise from that level on which man acts the part
of a machine, and tasks merely his body, to that higher level on which
he performs the proper part of a rational creature, and employs only his
mind. But that ambition need influence me no longer. My poor mother,
too--I had trusted to be of use to her."
"Ah, my friend," said Ferguson, "I can tell you of a case quite as
hopeless as your own--perhaps more so. But it will make you deem my
sympathy the result of mere selfishness. In scarce any respect do our
circumstances differ."
We had reached the ruins: the evening was calm and mild as when I had
walked out on the preceding one; but the hour was earlier, and the sun
hung higher over the hill. A newly-formed grave occupied the level spot
in front of the little ivied corner.
"Let us seat ourselves here," said my companion, "and I will tell you a
story--I am afraid a rather tame one; for there is nothing of adventure
in it, and nothing of incident; but it may at least show you that I am
not unfitted to be your friend. It is now nearly two years since I lost
my father. He was no common man--common neither in intellect nor in
sentiment; but though he once fondly hoped it should be otherwise--for
in early youth he indulged in all the dreams of the poet--he now fills a
grave as nameless as the one before us. He was a native of
Aberdeenshire; but held, latterly, an inferior situation in the office
of the British Linen Company in Edinburgh, where I was born. Ever since
I remember him, he had awakened too fully to the realities of life, and
they pressed too hard on his spirits, to leave him space for the
indulgence of his earlier fancies; but he could dream for his children,
though not for himself; or, as I should perhaps rather say, his children
fell heir to all his more juvenile hopes of fortune, and influence, and
space in the world's eye;--and, for himself, he indulged in hopes of a
later growth and firmer texture, which pointed from the present scene of
things to the future. I have an only brother, my senior by several
years, a lad of much energy, both physical and mental; in brief, one of
those mixtures of reflection and activity which seem best formed for
rising in the world. My father deemed him most fitted for commerce, and
had influence enough to get him introduced into the counting-house of a
respectable Edinburgh merchant. I was always of a graver turn--in part,
perhaps, the effect of less robust health--and me he intended for the
Church. I have been a dreamer, Mr. Lindsay, from my earliest
years--prone to melancholy, and fond of books and of solitude; and the
peculiarities of this temperament the sanguine old man, though no mean
judge of character, had mistaken for a serious and reflective
disposition. You are acquainted with literature, and know something,
from books at least, of the lives of literary men. Judge, then, of his
prospect of usefulness in any profession, who has lived, ever since he
knew himself, among the poets. My hopes, from my earliest years, have
been hopes of celebrity as a writer--not of wealth, or of influence, or
of accomplishing any of the thousand aims which furnish the great bulk
of mankind with motives. You will laugh at me. There is something so
emphatically shadowy and unreal in the object of this ambition, that
even the full attainment of it provokes a smile. For who does not know
'How vain that second life in others' breath,
The estate which wits inherit after death!'
And what can be more fraught with the ludicrous than a union of this
shadowy ambition with _mediocre_ parts and attainments! But I digress.
"It is now rather more than three years since I entered the classes
here. I competed for a bursary, and was fortunate enough to secure one.
Believe me, Mr. Lindsay, I am little ambitious of the fame of mere
scholarship, and yet I cannot express to you the triumph of that day. I
had seen my poor father labouring, far, far beyond his strength, for my
brother and myself--closely engaged during the day with his duties in
the bank, and copying at night in a lawyer's office. I had seen, with a
throbbing heart, his tall wasted frame becoming tremulous and bent, and
the grey hair thinning on his temples; and I now felt that I could ease
him of at least part of the burden. In the excitement of the moment, I
could hope that I was destined to rise in the world--to gain a name in
it, and something more. You know how a slight success grows in
importance when we can deem it the earnest of future good fortune. I
met, too, with a kind and influential friend in one of the professors,
the late Dr. Wilkie. Alas! good, benevolent man! you may see his tomb
yonder beside the wall; and, on my return from St. Andrew's, at the
close of the session, I found my father on his deathbed. My brother
Henry--who had been unfortunate, and, I am afraid, something worse--had
quitted the counting-house and entered aboard of a man-of-war as a
common sailor; and the poor old man, whose heart had been bound up in
him, never held up his head after.
"On the evening of my father's funeral, I could have lain down and died.
I never before felt how thoroughly I am unfitted for the world--how
totally I want strength. My father, I have said, had intended me for the
Church; and, in my progress onward from class to class, and from school
to college, I had thought but little of each particular step, as it
engaged me for the time, and nothing of the ultimate objects to which it
led. All my more vigorous aspirations were directed to a remote future
and an unsubstantial shadow. But I had witnessed, beside my father's
bed, what had led me seriously to reflect on the ostensible aim for
which I lived and studied; and the more carefully I weighed myself in
the balance, the more did I find myself awanting. You have heard of Mr.
Brown of the Secession, the author of the "Dictionary of the Bible." He
was an old acquaintance of my father's; and, on hearing of his illness,
had come all the way from Haddington to see him. I felt, for the first
time, as kneeling beside his bed, I heard my father's breathings
becoming every moment shorter and more difficult, and listened to the
prayers of the clergyman, that I had no business in the Church. And thus
I still continue to feel. 'Twere an easy matter to produce such things
as pass for sermons among us, and to go respectably enough through the
mere routine of the profession; but I cannot help feeling that, though I
might do all this and more, my duty, as a clergyman, would be still left
undone. I want singleness of aim--I want earnestness of heart. I cannot
teach men effectually how to live well; I cannot show them, with aught
of confidence, how they may die safe. I cannot enter the Church without
acting the part of a hypocrite; and the miserable part of the hypocrite
it shall never be mine to act. Heaven help me! I am too little a
practical moralist myself to attempt teaching morals to others.
"But I must conclude my story, if story it may be called:--I saw my
poor mother and my little sister deprived, by my father's death, of
their sole stay, and strove to exert myself in their behalf. In the
daytime I copied in a lawyer's office; my nights were spent among the
poets. You will deem it the very madness of vanity, Mr. Lindsay; but I
could not live without my dreams of literary eminence. I felt that life
would be a blank waste without them; and I feel so still. Do not laugh
at my weakness, when I say I would rather live in the memory of my
country than enjoy her fairest lands--that I dread a nameless grave many
times more than the grave itself. But, I am afraid, the life of the
literary aspirant is rarely a happy one; and I, alas! am one of the
weakest of the class. It is of importance that the means of living be
not disjoined from the end for which we live; and I feel that, in my
case, the disunion is complete. The wants and evils of life are around
me; but the energies through which those should be provided for, and
these warded off, are otherwise employed. I am like a man pressing
onward through a hot and bloody fight, his breast open to every blow,
and tremblingly alive to the sense of injury and the feeling of pain,
but totally unprepared either to attack or defend. And then those
miserable depressions of spirits to which all men who draw largely on
their imagination are so subject; and that wavering irregularity of
effort which seems so unavoidably the effect of pursuing a distant and
doubtful aim, and which proves so hostile to the formation of every
better habit--alas! to a steady morality itself. But I weary you, Mr.
Lindsay; besides, my story is told. I am groping onward, I know not
whither; and, in a few months hence, when my last session shall have
closed, I shall be exactly where you are at present."
He ceased speaking, and there was a pause of several minutes. I felt
soothed and gratified. There was a sweet melancholy music in the tones
of his voice, that sunk to my very heart; and the confidence he reposed
in me flattered my pride. "How was it," I at length said, "that you were
the gayest in the party of last night?"
"I do not know that I can better answer you," he replied, "than by
telling you a singular dream which I had about the time of my father's
death. I dreamed that I had suddenly quitted the world, and was
journeying, by a long and dreary passage, to the place of final
punishment. A blue, dismal light glimmered along the lower wall of the
vault; and, from the darkness above, where there flickered a thousand
undefined shapes--things without form or outline--I could hear
deeply-drawn sighs, and long hollow groans and convulsive sobbings, and
the prolonged moanings of an unceasing anguish. I was aware, however,
though I knew not how, that these were but the expressions of a lesser
misery, and that the seats of severer torment were still before me. I
went on and on, and the vault widened, and the light increased, and the
sounds changed. There were loud laughters and low mutterings, in the
tone of ridicule; and shouts of triumph and exultation; and, in brief,
all the thousand mingled tones of a gay and joyous revel. Can these, I
exclaimed, be the sounds of misery when at the deepest? 'Bethink thee,'
said a shadowy form beside me--'bethink thee if it be not so on earth.'
And as I remembered that it was so, and bethought me of the mad revels
of shipwrecked seamen and of plague-stricken cities, I awoke. But on
this subject you must spare me."
"Forgive me," I said; "to-morrow I leave college, and not with the less
reluctance that I must part from you. But I shall yet find you occupying
a place among the _literati_ of our country, and shall remember, with
pride, that you were my friend."
He sighed deeply. "My hopes rise and fall with my spirits," he said;
"and to-night I am melancholy. Do you ever go to buffets with yourself,
Mr. Lindsay? Do you ever mock, in your sadder moods, the hopes which
render you happiest when you are gay? Ah! 'tis bitter warfare when a man
contends with Hope!--when he sees her, with little aid from the
personifying influence, as a thing distinct from himself--a lying spirit
that comes to flatter and deceive him. It is thus I see her to-night.
"See'st thou that grave?--does mortal know
Aught of the dust that lies below?
'Tis foul, 'tis damp, 'tis void of form--
A bed where winds the loathsome worm;
A little heap, mouldering and brown,
Like that on flowerless meadow thrown
By mossy stream, when winter reigns
O'er leafless woods and wasted plains:
And yet that brown, damp, formless heap
Once glowed with feelings keen and deep;
Once eyed the light, once heard each sound
Of earth, air, wave, that murmurs round.
But now, ah! now, the name it bore,
Sex, age, or form, is known no more.
This, this alone, O Hope! I know,
That once the dust that lies below,
Was, like myself, of human race,
And made this world its dwelling-place.
Ah! this, when death has swept away
The myriads of life's present day,
Though bright the visions raised by thee,
Will all my fame, my history be!"
We quitted the ruins and returned to town.
"Have you yet formed," inquired my companion, "any plan for the future?"
"I quit St. Andrew's," I replied, "to-morrow morning. I have an uncle,
the master of a West Indiaman, now in the Clyde. Some years ago I had a
fancy for the life of a sailor, which has evaporated, however, with many
of my other boyish fancies and predilections; but I am strong and
active, and it strikes me there is less competition on sea at present
than on land. A man of tolerable steadiness and intelligence has a
better chance of rising as a sailor than as a mechanic. I shall set out,
therefore, with my uncle on his first voyage."