Scrieck's foundation for all his extravagant topographical derivations was

the passage from Plato. Doctor Johnson seems to have been the Plato of

these new etymological rambles; but we apprehend that neither the Greek

nor the British philosopher would be much edified by the philological

excursions of the Irish disciple. Nothing can be more perfect in its way

than the dogmatic audacity with which he assigns his derivations; it is in

the true vein of Bickerstaff, and a model to quacks of all classes.

"Before we commence our examination into the geographical divisions

of Italy, it is necessary to say something of that portion of the

world with which the Phoenicians became for the first time

acquainted after their settlements in Syria, since called _Europe_,

by an accident as trivial and unlikely to happen as that by which the

new world in modern times was denominated _America_, that is, by a

blunder of the Greeks. The fable of the rape of Europa, &c., was a

mere national allegory, of which the following is the substance. When

the Phoenician Homeritae had discovered the Mediterranean, &c.--they

sent out vessels to explore it, _e_, 'it,' _u_, 'from,' _ro_, 'to

go,' _ba_, 'was,' _tur_, 'voyage,' _ros_, 'to the promontory;' I. E.

_it was to go from a voyage to (Italy) the promontory_. This was, as

usual of the Greeks taking sound for sense, made into a _lady_ and a

_bull_--_tur ros_ must be the Greek [Greek: tauros], and the Lady

Europa was to ride the bull to Crete, which was one of the first

discoveries and settlements. Of the _children or results_, Minos has

been already explained as _mian_, 'minis,' nos, 'knowledge,' or 'the

art of mining.' Rhadamanthus means nothing more than that the voyage

to Crete was the first great result of discoveries on this sea: _ra_,

'going,' _ad_, 'illustrious,' _am_, 'great sea,' _en_, 'the,' _tus_,

'first.' So simple is the explanation!--(Vol. ii. p. 244.)

Scrieck had some remains of the modesty of learning, which prevent his

becoming a complete master of this style. The Peloponnesus might perhaps

possibly, he owned, have been derived from Pelops; though 'twas more

likely it should come from _Pfel-op-on_, &c. &c. That admission was

ill-judged: he ought to have denied that Pelops ever existed, and laughed

at the blundering Greeks. But the Irishman is a deacon of his craft, and

settles the point like an adept. "PELOPONNESUS, according to the Greek,

the island of Pelops. But the name was of much greater antiquity than

Greek civilization, and was, like all others, given by the Phoenicians.

Pelops was an imaginary character. The meaning of the word is, _the

promontory of the courteous people_; _bel_, 'mouth,' _aiobh_, 'courteous,'

_a_, 'the', _neas_, 'promontory,' _aos_, 'community, race of

people.'"--(Vol. ii. p. 254.)

When Partridge, the almanack-maker, had overlived the fatal day assigned

for his decease by Bickerstaff, he intimated as much to his friends and

the public, assuring them that he was not only then alive, but had also

been alive on the very 29th March, when the wise astrologer had foretold

he should die.

"Now," says Bickerstaff in reply, "I will plainly prove him to be

dead out of his own almanack for this year, and from the very passage

which he produceth to make us think him alive. He says, _he is not

only now alive, but was alive upon that very 29th of March which I

foretold he should die on_; by this he declares his opinion that a

man may be alive now who was not alive a twelvemonth ago. And,

indeed, there lies the sophistry of his argument. He dares not assert

that he was alive ever since that 29th of March, but that he _is now

alive, and was so on_ that day. I grant the latter, for he did not

die till night, as appears by the printed account of his death in a

_letter to a lord_, and whether he since revived I leave the world to

judge. This, indeed, is perfect cavilling; and I am ashamed to dwell

any longer upon it."

So if the shade of Pelops will receive our counsel, we advise him to

abstain from vouching any of the family of Tantalus to testify to the

reality of his existence; for he has to deal with a Bickerstaff, by whom

it has been demonstrated that Tantalus is nothing but _tain tal ais_,

"water receding backwards," or an incarnation of those fabulous times when

water was supposed to run uphill, whence it appears that the whole race of

Atreus is a mere series of non-existences. It is true we take this latter

derivation from an extract from another of this judicious discriminator's

labours, in the Transactions of his Academy, where, among other

etymological curiosities, we have that very Irish youth Narcissus, a

beautiful youth, who, seeing his _own_ image reflected in a stream, became

enamoured of it, thinking it the _nymph_ of the water. _Naobh ceas

as_--"the sight of a nymph in the stream." Pythia, "the priestess of

Apollo at Delphos. She _always_ delivered her oracles in hexameter verses,

and with musical intonation--_pitead_, 'music,' from whence the

name."[10]

Sanconiathon, no longer the "old beginning of time," appears here as

_san_, "holy," _con_, "understanding, sense, or wise men," _niod_, "real,"

_tain_, "of the country"--"the sacred writer or wise recorder of the

events of his country." Pygmalion, _big_, "little," _mallein_, "mule," the

_little mule_, or person of a low stature and obstinate disposition. This

is hardly so good as Swift's _pigmy lion_. "Pasiphae, _ba sabas_, 'the

propensity, fancy, or disposition of a cow;' and, _proh pudor_, Venus,

'herself,' _bhean_, 'the woman,' _aois_, 'of the community'--pronounced

_vanus_, 'the ---- or _woman of the town_!'"

But to come back to the geographical division of the Levant, to which _e u

ro ba tur ros_, which the foolish Greeks construed Europa and the bull,

were only preparatory, we have another luculent example of the Bickerstaff

style in _Gallia Togata_.

"It is said the country was called _Togata_ by the Romans, because

they wore the Roman _toga_ or gown. This seems doubtful, for when a

country became a Roman province, the same reason for the name should

apply universally. We must therefore seek a more satisfactory

derivation for that name, to be found in the circumstances of the

country. Gallia Togata consists of the plain country intersected by

the Po and its numerous tributaries, and surrounded on the north and

west by the high ranges of the Alps, on the south by the Apennines,

and on the east by the Adriatic. It is, perhaps, the best-watered and

most fertile country in Europe, enjoying a delightful climate. Its

name, Togata, says all this, _togh_, _it is the chosen land_, or, to

use an English idiom, _choice land, the most desirable and delightful

country_; _togh a ta_, literally _the chosen spot or place_. Sound,

not sense, suggested the Roman derivation."

Of course Gallia _Braccata_ and Gallia _Comata_ had just as little to say

to "long hair," or a "pair of breeches," as Gallia Togata to a Roman gown,

and the application of _gens togata_ to the inhabitants of Italy, as

contradistinguished from the transalpine and other provinces, was

altogether a blunder of the ancients.

"We have before us again CRETA, the largest of the Greek islands. Its

name is derived by some from the Curetes, who are said to have been

its first inhabitants; by others from the nymph Crete, daughter of

Hesperus; and by others from Creos, a son of Jupiter, and the nymph

Idoea. These are private conceits. It derives its name from its

shape and external appearance from the sea; and had such an island

been discovered in modern times by English navigators, it would have

been called _the ridge_ island, the precise meaning of its name in

Celtic _creit a_, "the ridge," putting the article last, in

conformity to idiom."

CYTHERA, "one of the Ionian Islands. Like all the other names for

which the Greeks had no known origin, they derived it from an

individual called _Cytherus_. It is subject to _heavy showers_, from

which the name _cith_, showers, _er_, great, _a_, the,--that is, _the

island of heavy showers_."

ZACYNTHUS.--"A small island to the south of Cephalonia, (_ce fal ia_;

_i. e._ the fruitful plains country.) The Greeks say the island was

named from a companion of Hercules, who, dying from the bite of a

serpent, was buried there. It was so called, because a strong current

is there first felt by the mariner coming from the east, _za cing

thus_, current, strong, first."

We really find some difficulty in believing that it is not Swift's _Essay

on the Antiquity of the English Language_ that we have before us.

"My present attempt is to assert the antiquity of our English tongue,

which, as I shall undertake to prove by invincible arguments, hath

varied very little for these two thousand six hundred and thirty-four

years past. And my proof shall be drawn from etymology, wherein I

shall use my matter much better than Skinner, Verstegan, Cambden, and

many other superficial pretenders have done; for I will put no force

upon the words, nor desire any more favour than to allow for the

usual accidents of composition, or the avoiding a _cacophonia_.

"I will begin with the Grecians, among whom the most ancient are the

Greek leaders on both sides at the siege of Troy. For it is plain,

from Homer, that the Trojans spoke Greek, as well as the Grecians. Of

these latter _Achilles_ was the most valiant. This hero was of a

restless, unquiet nature, and therefore, as Guy of Warwick was called

a _Kill-care_, and another terrible man a _Kill-Devil_, so this

general was called a _Kill-Ease_, or destroyer of ease, and at length

by corruption _Achilles_.

"Hector, on the other side, was the bravest among the Trojans. He had

destroyed so many of the Greeks by _hacking_ and _tearing_ them, that

his soldiers, when they saw him fighting, would cry out, 'Now the

enemy will be _hackt_--now he will be _tore_.' At last, by putting

both words together, the appellation was given to their leader under

the name of _Hack-tore_, and, for the more commodious sounding,

_Hector_.

"The next I shall mention is _Andromache_, the famous wife of Hector.

Her father was a Scottish gentleman of a noble family still

subsisting in that ancient kingdom; but being a foreigner in Troy, to

which city he led some of his countrymen in the defence of Priam, as

_Dictys Cretensis_ learnedly observes, Hector fell in love with his

daughter, and the father's name was _Andrew Mackay_. The young lady

was called by the same name, only a little softened to the Greek

accent."

And now, and as no Irish antiquary can be well supposed to write a

complete book without giving his own theory of the round towers of that

country, we come to the chapter on these singular structures, in which, of

course, all former enquirers are proved to have been egregiously wrong,

and a new theory established on incontrovertible evidence; viz. that the

round towers were monuments erected over different incarnations of the god

Buddho. As usual, there is the alleged mistake of sound for sense to

account for the reason why their common appellation of _clogteach_, or

"bell house," should not truly express their use.

"I shall remark upon a _vulgar error_ which has had great currency

among Irish antiquarians, who have asserted that they were called

_clogteach_, 'steeples, belfries.' Bells are of comparatively recent

introduction into Ireland, and _clock_, from which the word has

evidently been derived, still more modern. The blunder has arisen

from ignorance of the language. I have a memorandum in an Irish MS.,

that they were called by the people _leactaidh_, that is, _monuments

of the dead_, the sound of which has been mistaken by those who but

imperfectly knew the language. Many writers have been mistaken by

this."

The memorandum in the Irish MS. looks very like Bickerstaff's _Letter to a

Lord_. We could wager our crutch against the baton of the Ulster king,

that the memorandum is in his own or his scribe's handwriting, and the

language in which it is imagined, a variety of that new dialect in which

Mr Silk Buckingham declares that his Irish friends converse with the

Phoenician aborigines of Mount Atlas. But the proof of the pudding is

the eating of it, and it seems that under one of the towers they have

found Buddho himself, body and bones, which puts the matter beyond

controversy; for if Buddho be buried under the tower, the tower itself

must needs be Buddho's monument. At p. 210, (Vol. ii.,) we have a

representation of the Indian divinity (how comes it that Buddho is not

made an Etruscan?) lying buried in the basement of the tower at a place

called Ardmore. There seems to be no question that a skeleton was got in

the bottom of this tower, and another in another; and the discoverers of

the fact deserve credit for their addition to the slight stock of

knowledge that the Irish antiquarians seem to possess of those which are

perhaps the most singular monuments in their country; but that the bones

are those of a Buddho! really this exceeds our largest estimate of human

fatuity.

But for the communications announcing these discoveries, the two volumes

would be altogether destitute of a single fact, or even useful hint,

bearing on the diversified subjects which their prodigiously ignorant and

audacious author has presumed to handle. How far the fact of these

skeletons being found in such a situation, may affect the rational

investigation of the question, we do not pretend to judge. We would merely

observe, that human interments are found under most ecclesiastical

foundations, and that their occurrence under the "turres ecclesiasticae" of

Cambrensis, seems at present no more wonderful than their occurrence in

the vaults of an ordinary church.

But we really were surprised, after our long familiarity with "the holy

illustrious guiding one of the sea"--"the mighty lord of the waters"--"the

swift champion of the moon," and the other moonstruck pseudo deities of

the Eugubian tables, to find the chief place and honour in the island of

their own discovery and adoption taken from them, and bestowed on the

Indian Buddho. The "swift champion of the moon" seems to have been

sensible of the affront, and to have made his indignation perceptible in

the suggestion of an argument that can hardly have descended from any but

the lunar sphere; viz. that because the Buddhists of the east raise

monumental dagobas over the relics of their deity, and the Irish round

towers, as is alleged, (by a nameless interpolation in a nameless Irish

MS.,) have been called by a name arguing monumental purposes, that

therefore the Irish towers are dagobas, and any bones that may be found in

or about their foundations are relics of Buddho. The dagobas of Ceylon and

India are buildings of a totally different character from these towers;

they do strongly resemble the pyramidal structures of Yucatan, but bear

not the remotest likeness to any round tower either in Ireland or

elsewhere. Such facts might furnish grounds for arguing an identity

between Buddho and Quaccalcoatle, (and such an identity appears by no

means improbable;) but thence to attempt the deduction of any argument

applicable to the round towers in Ireland or Great Britain, only shows the

illogical constitution of the arguer's mind.

We have given the book and the subject more space than we intended, and

certainly much more than the former, by itself, is worth; but the subject

is one that, whether magnified into an undue importance by having been

repeatedly treated by men of note and learning or not, does, in the

present state of European literature, stand high among the loftiest marks

aimed at by human intellect; and any one singling himself from the crowd

of lookers-on, and addressing himself to hit it, makes himself, for the

moment, the observed of the whole learned world, and by his success or his

failure acquires honour, or brings down reproach upon his country. We

cannot permit British literature to be scandalized by the failure of one

from our ranks who is manifestly inadequate to the task even of handling

his piece, much less of bringing down the popinjay, without condemning the

rashness of the attempt, and exonerating ourselves from any charge of

participating in it.

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS: BEING A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH

OPIUM-EATER.

PART I.--(_Continued from last Number._)

"_But you forgot her,_" says the Cynic; "_you happened one day to forget

this sister of yours?_"--Why not? To cite the beautiful words of

Wallenstein,

"What pang

Is permanent with man? From the highest

As from the vilest thing of every day

He learns to wean himself. For the strong hours

Conquer him."[11]

Yes, _there_ lies the fountain of human oblivions. It is TIME, the great

conqueror, it is the "strong hours" whose batteries storm every passion of

men. For, in the fine expression of Schiller, "_Was verschmerzte nicht der

mensch?_" What sorrow is it in man that will not finally fret itself to

sleep? Conquering, at last, gates of brass, or pyramids of granite, why

should it be a marvel to us, or a triumph to Time, that he is able to

conquer a frail human heart?

However, for this once my Cynic must submit to be told--that he is wrong.

Doubtless, it is presumption in me to suggest that his sneers can ever go

awry, any more than the shafts of Apollo. But still, however impossible

such a thing is, in this one case it happens that they _have_. And when it

happens that they do not, I will tell you, reader, why in my opinion it

is; and you will see that it warrants no exultation in the Cynic.

Repeatedly I have heard a mother reproaching herself, when the birthday

revolved of the little daughter whom so suddenly she had lost, with her

own insensibility that could so soon need a remembrancer of the day. But,

besides, that the majority of people in this world (as being people called

to labour) have no time left for cherishing grief by solitude and

meditation, always it is proper to ask whether the memory of the lost

person were chiefly dependent upon a visual image. No death is usually

half so affecting as the death of a young child from two to five years

old.

But yet for the same reason which makes the grief more exquisite,

generally for such a loss it is likely to be more perishable. Wherever the

image, visually or audibly, of the lost person is more essential to the

life of the grief, there the grief will be more transitory.

Faces begin soon (in Shakspeare's fine expression) to "dislimn:" features

fluctuate: combinations of feature unsettle. Even the expression becomes a

mere idea that you can describe to another, but not an image that you can

reproduce for yourself. Therefore it is that the faces of infants, though

they are divine as flowers in a savanna of Texas, or as the carolling of

birds in a forest, are, like flowers in Texas, and the carolling of birds

in a forest, soon overtaken by the pursuing darkness that swallows up all

things human. All glories of flesh vanish; and this, the glory of

infantine beauty seen in the mirror of the memory, soonest of all. But

when the departed person worked upon yourself by powers that were

intellectual and moral--powers _in_ the flesh, though not _of_ the

flesh--the memorials in your own heart become more steadfast, if less

affecting at the first. Now, in my sister were combined for me both

graces--the graces of childhood, and the graces of expanding thought.

Besides that, as regards merely the _personal_ image, always the smooth

rotundity of baby features must vanish sooner, as being less individual

than the features in a child of eight, touched with a pensive tenderness,

and exalted into a characteristic expression by a premature intellect.

Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth remembering. Rubbish

dies instantly. Hence it happens that passages in Latin or English poets

which I never could have read but once, (and _that_ thirty years ago,)

often begin to blossom anew when I am lying awake, unable to sleep. I

become a distinguished compositor in the darkness; and, with my aerial

composing-stick, sometimes I "set up" half a page of verses, that would be

found tolerably correct if collated with the volume that I never had in my

hand but once. I mention this in no spirit of boasting. Far from it; for,

on the contrary, amongst my mortifications have been compliments to my

memory, when, in fact, any compliment that I had merited was due to the

higher faculty of an electric aptitude for seizing analogies, and by means

of those aerial pontoons passing over like lightning from one topic to

another. Still it is a fact, that this pertinacious life of memory for

things that simply touch the ear without touching the consciousness, does

in fact beset me. Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words

revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange themselves

gradually into sentences, but through an effort sometimes of a distressing

kind, to which I am in a manner forced to become a party. This being so,

it was no great instance of that power--that three separate passages in

the funeral service, all of which but one had escaped my notice at the

time, and even that one as to the part I am going to mention, but all of

which must have struck on my ear, restored themselves perfectly when I was

lying awake in bed; and though struck by their beauty, I was also incensed

by what seemed to be the harsh sentiment expressed in two of these

passages. I will cite all the three in an abbreviated form, both for my

immediate purpose, and for the indirect purpose of giving to those

unacquainted with the English funeral service some specimen of its beauty.

The first passage was this, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, of

his great mercy, to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here

departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to earth,

ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection

to eternal life." * * *

I pause to remark that a sublime effect arises at this point through a

sudden rapturous interpolation from the Apocalypse, which, according to

the rubric, "shall be said or sung;" but always let it be sung, and by the

full choir:--

"I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth

blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit; for

they rest from their labours."

The second passage, almost immediately succeeding to this awful burst of

heavenly trumpets, and the one which more particularly offended me, though

otherwise even then, in my seventh year, I could not but be touched by its

beauty, was this:--"Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of them

that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful,

after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and

felicity; WE give thee hearty thanks that it hath pleased thee to deliver

this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world; beseeching thee,

that it may please thee of thy gracious goodness shortly to accomplish the

number of thine elect, and to hasten thy kingdom." * *

In what world was I living when a man (calling himself a man of God) could

stand up publicly and give God "hearty thanks" that he had taken away my

sister? But, young child, understand--taken her away from the miseries of

this sinful world. Oh yes! I hear what you say; I understand _that_; but

that makes no difference at all. She being gone, this world doubtless (as

you say) is a world of unhappiness. But for me _ubi Caesar, ibi

Roma_--where my sister was, there was paradise; no matter whether in

heaven above, or on the earth beneath. And he had taken her away, cruel

priest! of his "_great_ mercy?" I did not presume, child though I was, to

think rebelliously against _that_. The reason was not any hypocritical or

canting submission where my heart yielded none, but because already my

deep musing intellect had perceived a mystery and a labyrinth in the

economies of this world. God, I saw, moved not as _we_ moved--walked not

as _we_ walked--thought not as _we_ think. Still I saw no mercy to myself,

a poor frail dependent creature--torn away so suddenly from the prop on

which altogether it depended. Oh yes! perhaps there was; and many years

after I came to suspect it. Nevertheless it was a benignity that pointed

far a-head; such as by a child could not have been perceived, because then

the great arch had not come round; could not have been recognized if it

_had_ come round; could not have been valued if it had even been dimly

recognized.

Finally, as the closing prayer in the whole service stood, this--which I

acknowledged then, and now acknowledge, as equally beautiful and

consolatory; for in this was no harsh peremptory challenge to the

infirmities of human grief as to a thing not meriting notice in a

religious rite. On the contrary, there was a gracious condescension from

the great apostle to grief, as to a passion that he might perhaps himself

have participated.

"Oh, merciful God! the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the

resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though

he die; who also taught us by his holy apostle St Paul not to be sorry, as

men without hope, for them that sleep in _him_; WE meekly beseech thee, O

Father! to raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness;

that, when we shall depart this life, we may rest in _him_ as our hope

is--that this our sister doth."

Ah, _that_ was beautiful; that was heavenly! We might be sorry, we had

leave to be sorry; only not without hope. And we were by hope to rest in

_Him_, as this our sister doth. And howsoever a man may think that he is

without hope, I, that have read the writing upon these great abysses of

grief, and viewed their shadows under the correction of mightier shadows

from deeper abysses since then, abysses of aboriginal fear and eldest

darkness, in which yet I believe that all hope had not absolutely died,

know that he is in a natural error. If, for a moment, I and so many

others, wallowing in the dust of affliction, could yet rise up suddenly

like the dry corpse[12] which stood upright in the glory of life when

touched by the bones of the prophet; if in those vast choral anthems,

heard by my childish ear, the voice of God wrapt itself as in a cloud of

music, saying--"Child, that sorrowest, I command thee to rise up and

ascend for a season into my heaven of heavens"--then it was plain that

despair, that the anguish of darkness, was not _essential_ to such sorrow,

but might come and go even as light comes and goes upon our troubled

earth.

Yes! the light may come and go; grief may wax and wane; grief may sink;

and grief again may rise, as in impassioned minds oftentimes it does, even

to the heaven of heavens; but there is a necessity--that, if too much left

to itself in solitude, finally it will descend into a depth from which

there is no re-ascent; into a disease which seems no disease; into a

languishing which, from its very sweetness, perplexes the mind and is

fancied to be very health. Witchcraft has seized upon you, nympholepsy has

struck you. Now you rave no more. You acquiesce; nay, you are passionately

delighted in your condition. Sweet becomes the grave, because you also

hope immediately to travel thither: luxurious is the separation, because

only perhaps for a few weeks shall it exist for you; and it will then

prove but the brief summer night that had retarded a little, by a

refinement of rapture, the heavenly dawn of reunion. Inevitable sometimes

it is in solitude--that this should happen with minds morbidly meditative;

that, when we stretch out our arms in darkness, vainly striving to draw

back the sweet faces that have vanished, slowly arises a new stratagem of

grief, and we say--"Be it that they no more come back to us, yet what

hinders but we should go to _them_?"

Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its effect perfectly the same as

the ignoble witchcraft of the poor African _Obeah_,[13] this sublimer

witchcraft of grief will, if left to follow its own natural course,

terminate in the same catastrophe of death. Poetry, which neglects no

phenomena that are interesting to the heart of man, has sometimes touched

a little

"On the sublime attractions of the grave."

But you think that these attractions, existing at times for the adult,

could not exist for the child. Understand that you are wrong. Understand

that these attractions _do_ exist for the child; and perhaps as much more

strongly than they _can_ exist for the adult, by the whole difference

between the concentration of a childish love, and the inevitable

distraction upon multiplied objects of any love that can affect an adult.

There is a German superstition (well-known by a popular translation) of

the Erl-king's Daughter, who fixes her love upon some child, and seeks to

wile him away into her own shadowy kingdom in forests.

"Who is it that rides through the forest so fast?"

It is a knight, who carries his child before him on the saddle. The

Erl-king's Daughter rides on his right hand, and still whispers

temptations to the infant audible only to _him_.

"If thou wilt, dear baby, with me go away,

We will see a fine show, we will play a fine play."

The consent of the baby is essential to her success. And finally she

_does_ succeed. Other charms, other temptations, would have been requisite

for me. My intellect was too advanced for those fascinations. But could

the Erl-king's Daughter have revealed herself to me, and promised to lead

me where my sister was, she might have wiled me by the hand into the

dimmest forests upon earth. Languishing was my condition at that time.

Still I languished for things "which" (a voice from heaven seemed to

answer through my own heart) "_can_not be granted;" and which, when again

I languished, again the voice repeated, "_cannot_ be granted."

* * * * *

Well it was for me that, at this crisis, I was summoned to put on the

harness of life, by commencing my classical studies under one of my

guardians, a clergyman of the English Church, and (so far as regarded

Latin) a most accomplished scholar.

At the very commencement of my new studies, there happened an incident

which afflicted me much for a short time, and left behind a gloomy

impression, that suffering and wretchedness were diffused amongst all

creatures that breathe. A person had given me a kitten. There are three

animals which seem, beyond all others, to reflect the beauty of human

infancy in two of its elements--viz. joy, and guileless innocence, though

less in its third element of simplicity, because _that_ requires language

for its full expression: these three animals are the kitten, the lamb, and

the fawn. Other creatures may be as happy, but they do not show it so

much. Great was the love which poor silly I had for this little kitten;

but, as I left home at ten in the morning, and did not return till near

five in the afternoon, I was obliged, with some anxiety, to throw it for

those seven hours upon its own discretion, as infirm a basis for

reasonable hope as could be imagined. I did not wish the kitten, indeed,

at all less foolish than it was, except just when I was leaving home, and

then its exceeding folly gave me a pang. Just about that time, it happened

that we had received, as a present from Leicestershire, a fine young

Newfoundland dog, who was under a cloud of disgrace for crimes of his

youthful blood committed in that county. One day he had taken too great a

liberty with a pretty little cousin of mine, Emma H----, about four years

old. He had, in fact, bitten off her cheek, which, remaining attached by a

shred, was, through the energy of a governess, replaced, and subsequently

healed without a scar. His name being _Turk_, he was immediately

pronounced by the best Greek scholar of that neighbourhood, [Greek:

eponymos] (_i. e._ named significantly, or reporting his nature in his

name.) But as Miss Emma confessed to having been engaged in taking away a

bone from him, on which subject no dog can be taught to understand a joke,

it did not strike our own authorities that he was to be considered in a

state of reprobation; and as our gardens (near to a great town) were, on

account chiefly of melons, constantly robbed, it was held that a moderate

degree of fierceness was rather a favourable trait in his character. My

poor kitten, it was supposed, had been engaged in the same playful

trespass upon Turk's property as my Leicestershire cousin, and Turk laid

her dead on the spot. It is impossible to describe my grief when the case

was made known to me at five o'clock in the evening, by a man's holding

out the little creature dead: she that I had left so full of glorious

life--life which even in a kitten is infinite--was now stretched in

motionless repose. I remember that there was a large coal stack in the

yard. I dropped my Latin books, sat down upon a huge block of coal, and

burst into a passion of tears. The man, struck with my tumultuous grief,

hurried into the house; and from the lower regions deployed instantly the

women of the laundry and the kitchen. No one subject is so absolutely

sacred, and enjoys so _classical_ a sanctity among girls, as 1. Grief; and

2. Love which is unfortunate. All the young women took me up in their arms

and kissed me; and last of all, an elderly who was the cook, not only

kissed me, but wept so audibly, from some suggestion doubtless of grief

personal to herself, that I threw my arms about her neck and kissed _her_

also. It is probable, as I now suppose, some account of my grief for my

sister had reached them. Else I was never allowed to visit _their_ region

of the house. But, however _that_ might be, afterwards it struck me, that

if I had met with so much sympathy, or with any sympathy at all, from the

servant chiefly connected with myself in the desolating grief I had

suffered, possibly I should not have been so profoundly shaken.

But did I in the mean time feel anger towards Turk? Not the least. And the

reason was this:--My guardian, who taught me Latin, was in the habit of

coming over and dining at my mother's table whenever he pleased. On these

occasions he, who like myself pitied _dependant_ animals, went invariably

into the yard of the offices, taking me with him, and unchained the dogs.

There were two--_Grim_, a mastiff, and _Turk_, our young friend. My

guardian was a bold athletic man, and delighted in dogs. He told me, which

also my own heart told me, that these poor dogs languished out their lives

under this confinement. The moment that I and my guardian (_ego et rex

meus_) appeared in sight of the two kennels, it is impossible to express

the joy of the dogs. Turk was usually restless; Grim slept away his life

in surliness. But at the sight of us--of my little insignificant self and

my six-foot guardian--both dogs yelled with delight. We unfastened their

chains with our own hands, they licking our hands; and as to myself,

licking my miserable little face; and at one bound they re-entered upon

their natural heritage of joy. Always we took them through the fields,

where they molested nothing, and closed with giving them a cold bath in

the brook which bounded my father's property. What despair must have

possessed our dogs when they were taken back to their hateful prisons! and

I, for my part, not enduring to see their misery, slunk away when the

rechaining commenced. It was in vain to tell me that all people, who had

property out of doors to protect, chained up dogs in the same way; _this_

only proved the extent of the oppression; for a monstrous oppression it

_did_ seem, that creatures, boiling with life and the desires of life,

should be thus detained in captivity until they were set free by death.

That liberation visited poor _Grim_ and _Turk_ sooner than any of us

expected, for they were both poisoned within the year that followed by a

party of burglars. At the end of that year I was reading the AEneid; and it

struck me, who remembered the howling recusancy of _Turk_, as a peculiarly

fine circumstance, introduced amongst the horrors of Tartarus, that sudden

gleam of powerful animals, full of life and conscious rights, rebelling

against chains:--

"Iraeque leonum

Vincla recusantum."[14]

Virgil had doubtless picked up that gem in his visits at feeding-time to

the _caveae_ of the Roman amphitheatre. But the rights of brute creatures

to a merciful forbearance on the part of man, could not enter into the

feeblest conceptions of one belonging to a nation that, (although too

noble to be _wantonly_ cruel,) yet in the same amphitheatre manifested so

little regard even to human rights. Under Christianity, the condition of

the brute has improved, and will improve much more. There is ample room.

For I am sorry to say, that the commonest vice of Christian children, too

often surveyed with careless eyes by mothers, that in their _human_

relations are full of kindness, is cruelty to the inferior creatures

thrown upon their mercy. For my own part, what had formed the groundwork

of my happiness, (since joyous was my nature, though overspread with a

cloud of sadness,) had been from the first a heart overflowing with love.

And I had drunk in too profoundly the spirit of Christianity from our many

nursery readings, not to read also in its divine words the justification

of my own tendencies. That which I desired, was the thing which I ought to

desire; the mercy that I loved was the mercy that God had blessed. From

the sermon on the Mount resounded for ever in my ears--"Blessed are the

merciful!" I needed not to add--"For they shall obtain mercy." By lips so

holy, and when standing in the atmosphere of truths so divine, simply to

have been blessed--_that_ was a sufficient ratification; every truth so

revealed, and so hallowed by position, starts into sudden life, and

becomes to itself its own authentication, needing no proof to convince,

needing no promise to allure.

It may well be supposed, therefore, that, having so early awakened within

me what may be philosophically called the _transcendental_ justice of

Christianity, I blamed not _Turk_ for yielding to the coercion of his

nature. He had killed the object of my love. But, besides that he was

under the constraint of a primary appetite--Turk was himself the victim of

a killing oppression. He was doomed to a fretful existence so long as he

should exist at all. Nothing could reconcile this to my benignity, which

at that time rested upon two pillars--upon the deep, deep heart which God

had given to me at my birth, and upon exquisite health. Up to the age of

two, and almost through that entire space of twenty-four months, I had

suffered from ague; but when _that_ left me, all germs and traces of ill

health fled away for ever--except only such (and those how curable!) as I

inherited from my schoolboy distresses in London, or had created by means

of opium. Even the long ague was not without ministrations of favour to my

prevailing temper; and on the whole, no subject for pity; since naturally

it won for me the sweet caresses of female tenderness both young and old.

I was a little petted; but you see by this time, reader, that I must have

been too much of a philosopher, even in the year one _ab urbe condita_ of

my frail earthly tenement, to abuse such indulgence. It also won for me a

ride on horseback whenever the weather permitted. I was placed on a

pillow, in front of a cankered old man, upon a large white horse, not so

young as _I_ was, but still showing traces of blood. And even the old man,

who was both the oldest and the worst of the three, talked with gentleness

to myself, reserving his surliness--for all the rest of the world.

These things pressed with a gracious power of incubation upon my

predispositions; and in my overflowing love I did things fitted to make

the reader laugh, and sometimes fitted to bring myself into perplexity.

One instance from a thousand may illustrate the combination of both

effects. At four years old, I had repeatedly seen the housemaid raising

her long broom and pursuing (generally destroying) a vagrant spider. The

holiness of all life, in my eyes, forced me to devise plots for saving the

poor doomed wretch; and thinking intercession likely to prove useless, my

policy was--to draw off the housemaid on pretence of showing her a

picture, until the spider, already _en route_, should have had time to

escape. Very soon, however, the shrewd housemaid, marking the coincidence

of these picture exhibitions with the agonies of fugitive spiders,

detected my stratagem; so that, if the reader will pardon an expression

borrowed from the street, henceforwards the picture was "no go." However,

as she approved of my motive, she told me of the many murders that the

spider had committed, and next (which was worse) of the many that he

certainly _would_ commit if reprieved. This staggered me. I could have

gladly forgiven the past; but it _did_ seem a false mercy to spare one

spider in order to scatter death amongst fifty flies. I thought timidly

for a moment, of suggesting that people sometimes repented, and that _he_

might repent; but I checked myself, on considering that I had never read

any account, and that she might laugh at the idea, of a penitent spider.

To desist was a necessity in these circumstances. But the difficulty which

the housemaid had suggested, did not depart; it troubled my musing mind to

perceive, that the welfare of one creature might stand upon the ruin of

another: and the case of the spider remained thenceforwards even more

perplexing to my understanding than it was painful to my heart.

The reader is likely to differ from me upon the question, moved by

recurring to such experiences of childhood, whether much value attaches to

the perceptions and intellectual glimpses of a child. Children, like men,

range through a gamut that is infinite, of temperaments and characters,

ascending from the very dust below our feet to highest heaven. I have seen

children that were sensual, brutal, devilish. But, thanks be to the _vis

medicatrix_ of human nature, and to the goodness of God, these are as rare

exhibitions as all other monsters. People thought, when seeing such odious

travesties and burlesques upon lovely human infancy, that perhaps the

little wretches might be _kilcrops_.[15] Yet, possibly, (it has since

occurred to me,) even these children of the fiend, as they seemed, might

have one chord in their horrible natures that answered to the call of some

sublime purpose. There is a mimic instance of this kind, often found

amongst ourselves in natures that are not really "horrible," but which

_seem_ such to persons viewing them from a station not sufficiently

central:--Always there are mischievous boys in a neighbourhood, boys who

tie canisters to the tails of cats belonging to ladies--a thing which

_greatly_ I disapprove; and who rob orchards--a thing which _slightly_ I

disapprove; and behold! the next day, on meeting the injured ladies, they

say to me, "Oh, my dear friend, never pretend to argue for him! This boy,

we shall all see, will come to be hanged." Well, _that_ seems a

disagreeable prospect for all parties; so I change the subject; and lo!

five years later, there is an English frigate fighting with a frigate of

heavier metal, (no matter of what nation.) The noble captain has

manoeuvred, as only _his_ countrymen can manoeuvre; he has delivered

his broadsides, as only the proud islanders can deliver them. Suddenly he

sees the opening for a _coup-de-main_; through his speaking-trumpet he

shouts--"_Where are my boarders?_" And instantly rise upon the deck, with

the gaiety of boyhood, in white shirt sleeves bound with black ribands,

fifty men, the _elite_ of the crew; and behold! at the very head of them,

cutlass in hand, is our friend the tyer of canisters to the tails of

ladies' cats--a thing which _greatly_ I disapprove, and also the robber of

orchards--a thing which _slightly_ I disapprove. But here is a man that

will not suffer you either greatly or slightly to disapprove him. Fire

celestial burns in his eye; his nation, his glorious nation, is in his

mind; himself he regards no more than the life of a cat, or the ruin of a

canister. On the deck of the enemy he throws himself with rapture, and if

_he_ is amongst the killed, if he for an object so gloriously unselfish

lays down with joy his life and glittering youth, mark this--that,

perhaps, he will not be the least in heaven.

But coming back to the case of childhood, I maintain steadfastly--that,

into all the _elementary_ feelings of man, children look with more

searching gaze than adults. My opinion is, that where circumstances

favour, where the heart is deep, where humility and tenderness exist in

strength, where the situation is favourable as to solitude and as to

genial feelings, children have a specific power of contemplating the

truth, which departs as they enter the world. It is clear to me, that

children, upon elementary paths which require no knowledge of the world to

unravel, tread more firmly than men; have a more pathetic sense of the

beauty which lies in justice; and, according to the immortal ode of our

great laureate, [ode "On the Intimations of Immortality in Childhood,"] a

far closer communion with God. I, if you observe, do not much intermeddle

with religion, properly so called. My path lies on the interspace between

religion and philosophy, that connects them both. Yet here for once I

shall trespass on grounds not properly mine, and desire you to observe in

St Matthew, chap. xxi., and v. 15, _who_ were those that, crying in the

temple, made the first public recognition of Christianity. Then, if you

say, "Oh, but children echo what they hear, and are no independent

authorities!" I must request you to extend your reading into v. 16, where

you will find that the testimony of these children, as bearing an

_original_ value, was ratified by the highest testimony; and the

recognition of these children did itself receive a heavenly recognition.

And this could _not_ have been, unless there were children in Jerusalem

who saw into truth with a far sharper eye than Sanhedrims and Rabbis.

It is impossible, with respect to any memorable grief, that it can be

adequately exhibited so as to indicate the enormity of the convulsion

which really it caused, without viewing it under a variety of aspects--a

thing which is here almost necessary for the effect of proportion to what

follows: 1st, for instance, in its immediate pressure, so stunning and

confounding; 2dly, in its oscillations, as in its earlier agitations,

frantic with tumults, that borrow the wings of the winds; or in its

diseased impulses of sick languishing desire, through which sorrow

transforms itself to a sunny angel, that beckons us to a sweet repose.

These phases of revolving affection I have already sketched. And I shall

also sketch a third, _i. e._ where the affliction, seemingly hushing

itself to sleep, suddenly soars upwards again upon combining with

_another_ mode of sorrow; viz. anxiety without definite limits, and the

trouble of a reproaching conscience. As sometimes,[16] upon the English

lakes, waterfowl that have careered in the air until the eye is wearied

with the eternal wheelings of their inimitable flight--Grecian

simplicities of motion, amidst a labyrinthine infinity of curves that

would baffle the geometry of Apollonius--seek the water at last, as if

with some settled purpose (you imagine) of reposing. Ah, how little have

you understood the omnipotence of that life which they inherit! _They_

want no rest; they laugh at resting; all is "make believe," as when an

infant hides its laughing face behind its mother's shawl. For a moment it

is still. Is it meaning to rest? Will its impatient heart endure to lurk

there for long? Ask rather if a cataract will stop from fatigue. Will a

sunbeam sleep on its travels? Or the Atlantic rest from its labours? As

little can the infant, as little can the waterfowl of the lakes, suspend

their play, except as a variety of play, or rest unless when nature

compels them. Suddenly starts off the infant, suddenly ascend the birds,

to new evolutions as incalculable as the caprices of a kaleidoscope; and

the glory of their motions, from the mixed immortalities of beauty and

inexhaustible variety, becomes at least pathetic to survey. So also, and

with such life of variation, do the _primary_ convulsions of nature--such,

perhaps, as only _primary_[17] formations in the human system can

experience--come round again and again by reverberating shocks.

The new intercourse with my guardian, and the changes of scene which

naturally it led to, were of use in weaning my mind from the mere disease

which threatened it in case I had been left any longer to my total

solitude. But out of these changes grew an incident which restored my

grief, though in a more troubled shape, and now for the first time

associated with something, like remorse and deadly anxiety. I can safely

say that this was my earliest trespass, and perhaps a venial one--all

things considered. Nobody ever discovered it; and but for my own frankness

it would not be know to this day. But _that_ I could not know; and for

years, that is from seven or earlier up to ten, such was my simplicity,

that I lived in constant terror. This, though it revived my grief, did me

probably great service; because it was no longer a state of languishing

desire tending to torpor, but of feverish irritation and gnawing care that

kept alive the activity of my understanding. The case was this:--It

happened that I had now, and commencing with my first introduction to

Latin studies, a large weekly allowance of pocket-money, too large for my

age, but safely entrusted to myself, who never spent or desired to spend

one fraction of it upon any thing but books. But all proved too little for

my colossal schemes. Had the Vatican, the Bodleian, and the _Bibliotheque

du Roi_ been all emptied into one collection for my private gratification,

little progress would have been made towards content in this particular

craving. Very soon I had run ahead of my allowance, and was about three

guineas deep in debt. There I paused; for deep anxiety now began to

oppress me as to the course in which this mysterious (and indeed guilty)

current of debt would finally flow. For the present it was frozen up; but

I had some reason for thinking that Christmas thawed all debts whatsoever,

and set them in motion towards innumerable pockets. Now _my_ debt would be

thawed with all the rest; and in what direction would it flow? There was

no river that would carry it off to sea; to somebody's pocket it would

beyond a doubt make its way; and who _was_ that somebody? This question

haunted me for ever. Christmas had come, Christmas had gone, and I heard

nothing of the three guineas. But I was not easier for _that_. Far rather

I _would_ have heard of it; for this indefinite approach of a loitering

catastrophe gnawed and fretted my feelings. No Grecian audience ever

waited with more shuddering horror for the anagnorisis[18] of the

OEdipus, than I for the explosion of my debt. Had I been less ignorant,

I should have proposed to mortgage my weekly allowance for the debt, or to

form a sinking fund for redeeming it; for the _weekly_ sum was nearly five

per cent on the entire debt. But I had a mysterious awe of ever alluding

to it. This arose from my want of some confidential friend; whilst my

grief pointed continually to the remembrance--that _so_ it had not always

been. But was not the bookseller to blame in suffering a child scarcely

seven years old to contract such a debt? Not in the least. He was both a

rich man, who could not possibly care for my trifling custom, and

notoriously an honourable man. Indeed the money which I myself spent every

week in books, would reasonably have caused him to presume that so small a

sum as three guineas might well be authorized by my family. He stood,

however, on plainer ground. For my guardian, who was very indolent, (as

people chose to call it,) that is, like his little melancholy ward, spent

all his time in reading, often enough would send me to the bookseller's

with a written order for books. This was to prevent my forgetting. But

when he found that such a thing as "forgetting" in the case of a book, was

wholly out of the question for me, the trouble of writing was dismissed.

And thus I had become factor-general on the part of my guardian, both for

_his_ books, and for such as were wanted on my own account in the natural

course of my education. My private "little account" had therefore in fact

flowed homewards at Christmas, not (as I anticipated) in the shape of an

independent current, but as a little tributary rill that was lost in the

waters of some more important river. This I now know, but could not then

have known with any certainty. So far, however, the affair would gradually

have sunk out of my anxieties as time wore on. But there was another item

in the case, which, from the excess of my ignorance, preyed upon my

spirits far more keenly; and this, keeping itself alive, kept also the

other incident alive. With respect to the debt, I was not so ignorant as

to think it of much danger by the mere amount: my own allowance furnished

a scale for preventing _that_ mistake: it was the principle, the having

presumed to contract debts on my own account, that I feared to have

exposed. But this other case was a ground for anxiety even as regarded the

amount; not really; but under the jesting representation made to me, which

I (as ever before and after) swallowed in perfect faith. Amongst the books

which I had bought, all English, was a history of Great Britain,

commencing of course with Brutus and a thousand years of impossibilities;

these fables being generously thrown in as a little gratuitous _extra_ to

the mass of truths which were to follow. This was to be completed in sixty

or eighty parts, I believe. But there was another work left more

indefinite as to its ultimate extent, and which from its nature seemed to

imply a far wider range. It was a general history of navigation, supported

by a vast body of voyages. Now, when I considered with myself what a huge

thing the sea was, and that so many thousands of captains, commodores,

admirals, were eternally running up and down it, and scoring lines upon

its face so rankly, that in some of the main "streets" and "squares" (as

one might call them) their tracks would blend into one undistinguishable

blot,--I began to fear that such a work tended to infinity. What was

little England to the universal sea? And yet _that_ went perhaps to

fourscore parts. Not enduring the uncertainty that now besieged my

tranquillity, I resolved to know the worst; and on a day ever memorable to

me I went down to the bookseller's. He was a mild elderly man, and to

myself had always shown a kind indulgent manner. Partly perhaps he had

been struck by my extreme gravity; and partly, during the many

conversations I had with him, on occasion of my guardian's orders for

books, with my laughable simplicity. But there was another reason which

had early won for me his paternal regard. For the first three or four

months I had found Latin something of a drudgery; and the incident which

for ever knocked away the "shores," at that time preventing my launch upon

the general bosom of Latin literature, was this:--One day the bookseller

took down a Beza's _Latin Testament_; and, opening it, asked me to

translate for him the chapter which he pointed to. I was struck by

perceiving that it was the great chapter of St Paul on the grave and

resurrection. I had never seen a Latin version: yet from the simplicity of

the scriptural style in _any_ translation, (though Beza's is far from

good) I could not well have failed in construing. But as it happened to be

this particular chapter, which in English I had read again and again with

so passionate a sense of its grandeur, I read it off with a fluency and

effect like some great opera-singer uttering a rapturous _bravura_. My

kind old friend expressed himself gratified, making me a present of the

book as a mark of his approbation. And it is remarkable, that from this

moment, when the deep memory of the English words had forced me into

seeing the precise correspondence of the two concurrent streams--Latin and

English--never again did any difficulty arise to check the velocity of my

progress in this particular language. At less than eleven years of age,

when as yet I was a very indifferent Grecian, I had become a brilliant

master of Latinity, as my Alcaics and Choriambics remain to testify: and

the whole occasion of a change so memorable to a boy, was this casual

summons to translate a composition with which my heart was filled. Ever

after this he showed me a caressing kindness, and so condescendingly, that

generally he would leave any people for a moment with whom he was engaged,

to come and speak to me. On this fatal day, however, for such it proved to

me, he could not do this. He saw me, indeed, and nodded, but could not

leave a party of elderly strangers. This accident threw me unavoidably

upon one of his young people. Now this was a market-day; and there was a

press of country people present, whom I did not wish to hear my question.

Never did human creature, with his heart palpitating at Delphi for the

solution of some killing mystery, stand before the priestess of the

oracle, with lips that moved more sadly than mine, when now advancing to a

smiling young man at a desk. His answer was to decide, though I could not

exactly know _that_, whether for the next two years I was to have an hour

of peace. He was a handsome, good-natured young man, but full of fun and

frolic; and I dare say was amused with what must have seemed to _him_ the

absurd anxiety of my features. I described the work to him, and he

understood me at once: how many volumes did he think it would extend to?

There was a whimsical expression perhaps of drollery about his eyes, but

which unhappily, under my preconceptions, I translated into scorn, as he

replied,--"How may volumes? Oh! really I can't say, maybe a matter of

15,000, be the same more or less." "_More?_" I said in horror, altogether

neglecting the contingency of "less." "Why," he said, "we can't settle

these things to a nicety. But, considering the subject," [ay, _that_ was

the very thing which I myself considered,] "I should say, there might be

some trifle over, as suppose 400 or 500 volumes, be the same more or

less." What, then, here there might be supplements to supplements--the

work might positively _never_ end. On one pretence or another, if an

author or publisher might add 500 volumes, he might add another round

15,000. Indeed it strikes one even now, that by the time all the

one-legged commodores and yellow admirals of that generation had exhausted

their long yarns, another generation would have grown another crop of the

same gallant spinners. I asked no more, but slunk out of the shop, and

never again entered it with cheerfulness, or propounded any frank

questions as heretofore. For I was now seriously afraid of pointing

attention to myself as one that, by having purchased some numbers, and

obtained others on credit, had silently contracted an engagement to take

all the rest, though they should stretch to the crack of doom. Certainly

I had never heard of a work that extended to 15,000 volumes; but still

there was no natural impossibility that it should; and, if in any case, in

none so reasonably as one upon the inexhaustible sea. Besides, any slight

mistake as to the letter of the number, could not affect the horror of the

final prospect. I saw by the imprint, and I heard, that this work emanated

from London, a vast centre of mystery to me, and the more so, as a thing

unseen at any time by my eyes, and nearly 200 miles distant. I felt the

fatal truth, that here was a ghostly cobweb radiating into all the

provinces from the mighty metropolis. I secretly had trodden upon the

outer circumference, had damaged or deranged the fine threads and

links,--concealment or reparation there could be none. Slowly perhaps, but

surely, the vibration would travel back to London. The ancient spider that

sat there at the centre, would rush along the network through all

longitudes and latitudes, until he found the responsible caitiff, author

of so much mischief. Even, with less ignorance than mine, there _was_

something to appal a child's imagination in the vast systematic machinery

by which any elaborate work could disperse itself, could levy money, could

put questions and get answers--all in profound silence, nay, even in

darkness--searching every nook of every town, and of every hamlet in so

populous a kingdom. I had some dim terrors, also, connected with the

Stationers' Company. I had often observed them in popular works

threatening unknown men with unknown chastisements, for offences equally

unknown; nay, to myself, absolutely inconceivable. Could _I_ be the

mysterious criminal so long pointed out, as it were, in prophecy? I

figured the stationers, doubtless all powerful men, pulling at one rope,

and my unhappy self hanging at the other end. But an image, which seems

now even more ludicrous than the rest, at that time was the one most

connected with the revival of my grief. It occurred to my subtlety, that

the Stationers' Company, or any other company, could not possibly demand

the money until they had delivered the volumes. And, as no man could say

that I had ever positively refused to receive them, they would have no

pretence for not accomplishing this delivery in a civil manner. Unless I

should turn out to be no customer at all, at present it was clear that I

had a right to be considered a most excellent customer; one, in fact, who

had given an order for fifteen thousand volumes. Then rose up before me

this great opera-house "scena" of the delivery. There would be a ring at

the front door. A waggoner in the front, with a bland voice, would ask for

"a young gentleman who had given an order to _their_ house." Looking out,

I should perceive a procession of carts and waggons, all advancing in

measured movements; each in turn would present its rear, deliver its cargo

of volumes, by shooting them, like a load of coals, on the lawn, and wheel

off to the rear, by way of clearing the road for its successors. Then the

impossibility of even asking the servants to cover with sheets, or

counterpanes, or tablecloths, such a mountainous, such a "star-y-pointing"

record of my past offences lying in so conspicuous a situation! Men would

not know my guilt merely, they would see it. But the reason why this form

of the consequences, so much more than any other, stuck by my imagination

was, that it connected itself with one of the Arabian nights which had

particularly interested myself and my sister. It was that tale, where a

young porter, having his ropes about his person, had stumbled into the

special "preserve" of some old magician. He finds a beautiful lady

imprisoned, to whom (and not without prospects of success) he recommends

himself as a suitor, more in harmony with her own years than a withered

magician. At this crisis the magician returns. The young man bolts, and

for that day successfully; but unluckily he leaves his ropes behind. Next

morning he hears the magician, too honest by half, enquiring at the front

door, with much expression of condolence, for the unfortunate young man

who had lost his ropes in his own zenana. Upon this story I used to amuse

my sister, by ventriloquizing to the magician from the lips of the

trembling young man--"Oh, Mr Magician, these ropes cannot be mine! They

are far too good; and one wouldn't like, you know, to rob some other poor

young man. If you please, Mr Magician, I never had money enough to buy so

beautiful a set of ropes." But argument is thrown away upon a magician,

and off he sets on his travels with the young porter--not forgetting to

take the ropes along with him.

Here now was the case, that had once seemed so impressive to me in a mere

fiction from a far-distant age and land, literally reproduced in myself.

For what did it matter whether a magician dunned one with old ropes for

his engines of torture, or Stationers' Hall with 15,000 volumes, (in the

rear of which there might also be ropes?) Should _I_ have ventriloquized,

would my sister have laughed, had either of us but guessed the possibility

that I myself, and within one twelve months, and, alas! standing alone in

the world as regarded _confidential_ counsel, should repeat within my own

inner experience the shadowy panic of the young Bagdat intruder upon the

privacy of magicians? It appeared, then, that I had been reading a legend

concerning myself in the _Arabian Nights_. I had been contemplated in

types a thousand years before on the banks of the Tigris. It was horror

and grief that prompted that thought.

Oh, heavens! that the misery of a child should by possibility become the

laughter of adults!--that even I, the sufferer, should be capable of

amusing myself, as if it had been a jest, with what for three years had

constituted the secret affliction of my life, and its eternal

trepidation--like the ticking of a death-watch to patients lying awake in

the plague. I durst ask no counsel; there was no one to ask. Possibly my

sister could lave given me none in a case which neither of us should have

understood, and where to seek for information from others, would have been

at once to betray the whole reason for seeking it. But, if no advice, she

would have given me her pity, and the expression of her endless love; and,

with the relief of sympathy, that heals for a season all distresses, she

would have given me that exquisite luxury--the knowledge that, having

parted with my secret, yet also I had _not_ parted with it, since it was

in the power only of one that could much less betray me than I could

betray myself. At this time, that is about the year when I suffered most,

I was reading Caesar. Oh, laurelled scholar--sun-bright intellect--"foremost

man of all this world"--how often did I make out of thy immortal volume a

pillow to support my wearied brow, as at evening, on my homeward road, I

used to turn into some silent field, where I might give way unobserved to

the reveries which besieged me! I wondered, and found no end of wondering,

at the revolution that one short year had made in my happiness. I wondered

that such billows _could_ overtake me! At the beginning of that year how

radiantly happy! At the end how insupportably alone!

"Into what depth thou see'st,

From what height fallen."

For ever I searched the abysses with some wandering thoughts

unintelligible to myself. For ever I dallied with some obscure notion, how

my sister's love might be made in some dim way available for delivering me

from misery; or else how the misery I had suffered and was suffering might

be made, in some way equally dim, the ransom for winning back her love.

* * * * *

Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some cloud-scaling swing,

oscillating under the impulse of lunatic hands; for the strength of lunacy

may belong to human dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the malice

of lunacy, whilst the _victim_ of those dreams may be all the more

certainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers cohesion and

strength from the increasing resistance into which it is forced by

increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as you reach the lowest

point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of

corresponding ascent. Ups and downs you will see, heights and depths, in

our fiery course together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly

and suspiciously at me, your guide, and the ruler of the oscillations.

Here, at the point where I have called a halt, the reader has reached the

lowest depth in my nursery afflictions. From that point, according to the

principles of _art_ which govern the movement of these Confessions, I had

meant to launch him upwards through the whole arch of ascending visions

which seemed requisite to balance the sweep downwards, so recently

described in his course. But accidents of the press have made it

impossible to accomplish this purpose in the present month's journal.

There is reason to regret that the advantages of position, which were

essential to the full effect of passages planned for equipoise and mutual

resistance, have thus been lost. Meantime, upon the principle of the

mariner who rigs a _jury_-mast in default of his regular spars, I find my

resource in a sort of "jury" peroration--not sufficient in the way of a

balance by its _proportions_, but sufficient to indicate the _quality_ of

the balance which I had contemplated. He who has _really_ read the

preceding parts of these present Confessions, will be aware that a

stricter scrutiny of the past, such as was natural after the whole economy

of the dreaming faculty had been convulsed beyond all precedents on

record, led me to the conviction that not one agency, but two agencies,

had co-operated to the tremendous result. The nursery experience had been

the ally and the natural co-efficient of the opium. For that reason it was

that the nursery experience has been narrated. Logically, it bears the

very same relation to the convulsions of the dreaming faculty as the

opium. The idealizing tendency existed in the dream-theatre of my

childhood; but the preternatural strength of its action and colouring was

first developed after the confluence of the _two_ causes. The reader must

suppose me at Oxford: twelve years and a half are gone by; I am in the

glory of youthful happiness; but I have now first tampered with opium; and

now first the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength, now first

they swept in upon the brain with power and the grandeur of recovered

life, under the separate and the concurring inspirations of opium.

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood

expanded before me--my sister was moaning in bed--I was beginning to be

restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but

now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with

her uplifted hand, and like the superb Medea standing alone with her

children in the nursery at Corinth,[19] smote me senseless to the ground.

Again, I was in the chamber with my sister's corpse--again the pomps of

life rose up in silence, the glory of summer, the frost of death. Dream

formed itself mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams

remoulded itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,--the blue

heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in

the thought (but not the sight) of "Him that sate thereon;" the flight,

the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the

funeral procession gathered; the priest in his white surplice stood

waiting with a book in his hand by the side of an open grave, the

sacristan with his shovel; the coffin sank; the _dust to dust_ descended.

Again I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden

sunlight of God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his

saints; the fragment from the litany--the fragment from the clouds--awoke

again the lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens--awoke again the

shadowy arms that moved downwards to meet them. Once again, arose the

swell of the anthem--the burst of the Hallelujah chorus--the storm--the

trampling movement of the choral passion--the agitation of my own

trembling sympathy--the tumult of the choir--the wrath of the organ. Once

more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now in

Oxford, all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were

melted into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high above my

own station, hovered a gleaming host of heavenly beings, surrounding the

pillows of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with

sorrow that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the

children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only to

languish in tears.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

NO. III.

DRYDEN.

Sir Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this

passage:--"I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the

literary character, of JOHN DRYDEN; who, educated in a pedantic taste and

a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of

England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into

satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and

exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful

and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give

an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a

name SECOND ONLY TO THOSE OF MILTON AND OF SHAKSPEARE." Two names we miss,

and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not

surely below Dryden's--those of CHAUCER and SPENSER.

Let those Four names form a constellation--and the star Dryden, large and

bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the

heavens. First in the second order of English poets--let glorious John

keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not

that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the

second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten,

that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and

Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but

in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere

of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for

a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with

precipitation, but as in a balloon.

To an Englishman recollecting the poetical glories of his country, the

Seventeenth Century often appears as the mother of one great name--MILTON.

Original and mighty poets express, at its highest, the mind of their time

as it is localized on their own soil. With Elizabeth the splendour of the

feudal and chivalrous ages for England finally sets. A world expires, and

erelong a new world rises. The Wars which signalize the new period,

contrast deeply with those which heretofore tore the land. Those were the

factions of high lineages. Now, thought seizes the weapons of earthly

warfare. The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the

country--the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by

the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms

into men's hands. The highest of all the interests of the human

being--higher than all others, as eternity excels time--Religion--is

equally debated. The Protestant church is beleaguered by hostile

sects--the Reformation subjected to the demand for a more searching and

effective reform. Creed, worship, ecclesiastical discipline and

government, all come into debate. A thraldom of opinion--a bondage of

authority, that held for many centuries the nation bound together in no

powerless union, is, upon the sudden, broken up. Men will know why they

obey and why they believe; and human laws and divine truths are searched,

as far as the wit of man is capable, to the roots. It is the spirit of the

new time that has broken forth, and begins ambitiously, and riotously, to

try its powers, but nobly, magnanimously, and heroically too. MILTON owned

and showed himself a son of the time. Gifted with powers eminently fitted

for severe investigation--apt for learning, and learned beyond most

men--of a temper adverse and rebellious to an assumed and ungrounded

control--large-hearted and large-minded to comprehend the diverse

interests of men--personally fearless--devout in the highest and boldest

sense of the word; namely, as acknowledging no supreme law but from

heaven, and as confiding in the immediate communication of divine

assistance to the faithful servants of heaven--possessing, moreover, in

amplest measure, that peculiar endowment of sovereign poets which enables

them to stand up as the teachers of a lofty and tender wisdom, as moral

prophets to the species, the clear faculty of profound self-inspection--he

was prepared to share in the intellectual strife and change of that day,

even had some interposing, pacific angel charmed away from the bosom of

the land all other warfare and revolution--and to shine in that age's

work, even had the muse never smiled upon his cradled forehead, never laid

the magical murmurs of song on his chosen lips. He was a politician, a

theologian of his age--amidst the demolition of established things, the

clang of arms, and the streaming of blood, whether in the field or upon

the scaffold, a thinker and a writer.

There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce

imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times, produce the imitative; times

that rouse in man self-consciousnesses, produce the real. All great poetry

has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep,

universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and

profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of, that profound

sympathy, is vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy

with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring

out humanity--show its terrible depths--also its might and grandeur--both

ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when

there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination.

Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and

shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for

poetry--as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all

letters--that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in

the _Paradise Lost_, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged."

Happily for the literary fame of his country--for the solid exaltation in

these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated--for the lovers

of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and

expressive language which he still ennobled--for the serene fame of the

august poet himself--the political repose which a new change (the

restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread

over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and

ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the

dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the

still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all

"barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the

beginning--not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.

Educated by such a strife to power--and not more sublimely gifted than

strenuously exercised--Milton had constantly carried in his soul the

twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a

great poet; and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang

in his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be

to his; and this was the lower vocation--glorious as earthly things may be

glorious--and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one

that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and public-spirited, while he

trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his

own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and

feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense

of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible--the assiduous

hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that

seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness

and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great

taskmaster"--trained by all recluse and silent studies--trained by the

turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the

general contention--according to the self-dedication of his mind trained

within the temple--he, stricken with darkness, and amidst the gloom of

extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet.

The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the

loudest, and, at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with

the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of

the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the

human faculties can engage--the all-involving question--How is the world

governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God?

And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will

"Assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to man."

The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from

without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own

choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of

the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallen--in

the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared.

And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the

Covenant of Mercy, by finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two

events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as

infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the

destinies of the human race, upon which all our woe, and, in the highest

sense, all our weal are hung, become the subject of the work--the Fall of

man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.

The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic

simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes

accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few

more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial

transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly

as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic.

That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant

generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's

self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from

utter despair, and which tranquillizes the sadness, has to be interwoven

in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has

disposed and ordered the immensity!--comprehended the complexity of the

subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate Whole!

Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a

hymn--unless he had begun to sing as a worshipper with his hands uplifted

before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been

more than bold--it would have been the daring of presumption--an act of

impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the

Son--disclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person

of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit,

it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman

Catholic poet, we could forgive every thing. For nursed among legends and

visual representations of the invisible--panoplied in a childlike imposed

faith from the access of impiety--his paternoster and his ave-marie more

familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath--the most

audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a

scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a

spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst on the waters

of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armoury of God "are given him

tempered"--he to holy things cannot lay other than an awful hand. We know

that he believed himself under a peculiar guidance. Surely, he had had

visions of glory which, when he designed the poem that would include

scenes in heaven, offered themselves again almost like very revelations.

If we hesitate in believing this of him, it is because we conceive in him

a stern intellectual pride and strength, which could not easily kneel to

adore. But there we should greatly err. For he recognized in himself--

"Self-knowing, and from thence

Magnanimous to correspond with heaven"--

that capacity of song which nothing but sacred Epos could satisfy.

Diodati asks him--"_Quid studes?_" and he answers--"_Mehercle,

immortalitatem!_" This might persuade us that he finally chose the Fall of

Man as he at first had chosen King Arthur. But not so. When Arthur dropped

away from his purposes, naturally displaced by the after-choice, the will

toward an Epic underwent an answerable revolution. The first subject was

called by the "longing after immortality." But another longing, or the

longing after another immortality, carried the will and the man to the

second. The learning and the learned art of the _Paradise Lost_, concur in

inclining us to look upon Milton as an artist rather than a worshipper. On

closer consideration of its spirit, we cannot think of his putting his

hand to such a work without the inwardly felt conviction that _God was

with him in it_.

And, what is the feeling with which a youthful mind first regards the

_Paradise Lost_? A holy awe--something as if it were a second Bible. So,

too, have felt towards it our great poets. Elwood, the Quaker, has told

us, but we cannot believe him, that _he_ suggested to Milton the _Paradise

Regained_! Hardly credible that, being the natural sequel and complement

of the _Paradise Lost_, it should not have occurred to Milton. Pray, did

the Quaker _suggest the treatment_? To conceive that man was virtually

redeemed when Jesus had avouched, by proof, his perfect obedience, was a

view, we think, proper to spring in a religious mind. It is remarkable,

however, certainly, that the Atoning Sacrifice, which in the _Paradise

Lost_ is brought into the front of the Divine rule and of the poem, in the

_Paradise Regained_ hardly appears--if at all. In both you see the holy

awe with which Milton shuns describing the scenes of the Passion. Between

Adam and Michael, on that "top of speculation" the Visions end at the

Deluge. The Crucifixion falls amongst the recorded events, and is told

with few and sparing words. You _must_ think that the removal of the dread

Crucifixion from the action of the _Paradise Regained_ recommended that

action to the poet--contradicting Warburton, who blames him, as a poet,

for not having chosen the more stupendous action. Milton thus obtained

further a perfect Greek simplicity of plan. The Crucifixion has always

seemed profaned when any modern poet has dared to describe it.

The _Samson Agonistes_ was, you know, Milton's last work. How suitable,

above all other subjects, to the Hebrew soul within him! Their common

blindness--the simplicity of character that is proper to a strong

man--"the plain heroic magnitude of mind"--the absolute dependence on God,

that is to say, trustful dependence brought out by blindness--the

submission under the visiting hand of heaven provoked by Samson's own

disobedience--God's especial selection of him _as his own_, a dedicated

Nazarite--his call to be a national deliverer--All these combined to

affect his devout imagination; while one might almost think, that in the

youthful Milton the same fancy had delighted in the prowess and exploits

of Samson which rejoiced in the heroes of chivalrous fable.

What are Dryden's works to these? How shall we compare Poet with Poet--Man

with Man?

Let us then turn to the other clauses in Sir Walter's eulogium, and we

shall be able to go along with him in much--not all--of what he affirms of

his darling Dryden. He was verily A GREAT TRANSLATOR. But before speaking

of his performances, or of his principles, in that Fine Art, Translation,

let us say a few words on its range and power.

It is indeed most desirable to have the gift of tongues, though the

"myriad-minded" man had but that of his own. There are people who can

parley all the European languages, even like so many natives, and read you

off-hand any strange-looking page, be it even MS., you can submit to their

eyes. Yet, we believe, they always most feelingly understand the "old

familiar faces" of the words they got by heart in lisping them, and that

became a part of their being, not by process of study, but by that seeming

inspiration, through which childhood is ever joyfully acquiring

multifarious lore in the spirit of love. In waking and sleeping dreams we

speak our mother tongue. In it we make love--in it we say our prayers.

Had he lived till he was fourscore, John Leyden, in the dotage of genius,

would have maundered by the banks of the Ganges in the Doric that charmed

his ears among the murmurs of the Teviot. Heaven bless the man who

invented Translation! Heaven bless Translators all--especially those who

give us in English all thoughts, rich and rare, that took life in foreign

attire, and continue to charm human hearts, and souls, and minds, in a

change of light that shows them sometimes even more beautiful than when

first they had a place among airy creatures!

But methinks we hear some wiseacre, who is no wizard, exclaim:--"Oh! to be

enjoyed, it must be read in the original!" What! the Bible? You have no

Hebrew, and little Greek, but surely you sometimes dip into the Old and

into the New Testament.

To treat the question more argumentatively, let Prose Composition be

divided into History, Philosophy, Oratory. In History, Translation--say

into English--is easiest, and in all cases practicable. The information

transferred is the chief thing asked, even if Style be lost--with some

writers a small, with others no doubt a considerable, with a few a great

loss. But the facts, that is, the events, and all the characters too, can

be turned over, although one finer historical fact--the spirit of the

country and time, as breathing in the very Style of the artist, may, yet

need not, evaporate. The Translator, however, should be himself an

historian or antiquary, and should confine himself--as, indeed, if left to

himself he will do--to the nation in whose fate he happens to have had

awakened in him--by influences hard to tell, and perhaps to himself

unknown--the perpetual interest of a sympathy that endears to him, above

all others, that especial region, and the ages that like shadows have

passed over it.

In Philosophy, the Translator's task is harder, and it is higher; but its

accomplishment is open to the zealous lover of truth. The whole philosophy

must be thoroughly possessed by him, or meanings will be lost from, or

imposed on, the author--cases fatal both. Besides, of all writers, a

philosopher most collects extensive and penetrating theories into chosen

words. No dictionary--the soul only of the philosopher interprets these

words. In the new language, you must have great power and mastery to seize

equivalents if there; if not, to create them, or to extricate yourself

with circumlocutions that do not bewilder or mislead--precise and

exquisite. Have we, in our language, many, any such Translations? Not

Taylor's or Sydenham's Plato--not Gillies's Aristotle. Coleridge is

dead--but De Quincey is alive.

In Oratory, the Style is all in all. It is the _ipsissimus homo_. He who

"wielded at will that fierce democratic," does not appear unless the

thunder growl and the lightning dazzle. From what hand shall it fulmine

over England as over Greece? Yet the matter, the facts, the order, the

logic, are all easily enough to be transferred--not the passion and the

splendour, except by an orator, and even hardly by him; but Brougham has

grappled manfully with Demosthenes, though he hath somewhat diminished the

power of the Crown.

But in Poetry. Ay, there the difficulties grow--there all are

collected--and one equal to all, or nearly so, is added--VERSE! Of all

writers, the poet is the most exquisite in his words. His creations

revolve in them--live in them--breathe and burn. Shakspeare expresses

this--"the poet's _pen_ turns them to shape." Ariel, and Lear, and Hamlet,

are not except in the very words--their very own words. For the poet, of

all men, feels most susceptibly, sensitively, perceptively, acutely,

accurately, clearly, tenderly, kindly--the contact of his mind with yours;

and the words are the _medium of contact_! Yet, most of the ILIAD may be

transferred--for it is a history. The manners are easily depicted in a

Translation--so is the wonderful thinking that remains to us therein from

that remote lost world--and makes the substratum of the poem. In short,

that old world which Homer preserves, can be shown in a Translation, but

_not Homer himself_. The simplicity, and sweetness, and majesty, and the

musical soul and art, require Greek, and old Greek. A translation into

Attic Greek by Sophocles, would not be Homer. Into modern English? Alas,

and alack-a-day! An English translator might better undertake Euripides

than Sophocles, and Sophocles than AEschylus. AEschylus, Pindar,

Homer--these are the three terrors of Translation. Why? They are doubly so

remote! Distant so far, and distant so high! We should not, ourselves,

much care for undertaking Apollonius Rhodius, and Callimachus, although

the Alexandrian schoolmaster abounds in the poetical riches of the Greek

tongue, and the Cyrenaic hymnist has an unattainable spirit of grace and

elastic step. Yet we could, with a safe conscience, try; because if less

glory be attempted by the translator, less can be lost for his original.

Whereas, if we let down Homer, Pindar, AEschylus, we are lowering the

heights of the human spirit--_crimen laesoe majestatis_. In poetry the

absolutely creative power of the human spirit--that immense endowment and

privilege of the human being--is at its height. Many view this endowment

and privilege with scepticism--renouncing their own glory--denying

themselves. Therefore, it is always important, in civilized times, that

the majesty and might of poetry be sustained--surrounded by a body-guard

of opinion. In rude times it can take good care of itself. Then the king

walks among the people safe in their faith and love. Now you tremble to

diminish the reverence of that creation. But courage! All cannot read

Greek, and they are, as fellow men of Homer, entitled to as much of him as

they can get. Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, all taken together, impress

an Englishman (Scotsman included) who is no Grecian, with a belief in

greatness. And then for the perpetual feeding of his faith he has his own

Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton.

Translation, you see then, O gracious perusers! has divers motives. One is

ambitious. It is to help in giving the poet his due fame, and that is a

motive honourably sprung, since it comes of the belief that the poet

belongs to the species at large; and that accordingly his praise has not

had its full reverberation, until it has rebounded from all hearts. Of the

same impulse, but dealing justice in another direction, is the wish that

the less learned shall not, from that accident, forfeit their share of the

common patrimony; and that surely is among the best of all reasons. A

peculiar sort of zeal is to cultivate the vernacular literature by

transplanting the great works of other more happily cultivated languages,

as we naturalize fair and useful exotics. This is an early thought, and

goes off as the country advances. Probably the different reasons of

Translation would affect, even materially, the characters of Translation;

or at least, if they coexist, the predominance of one over the other

moving causes. The different purposes will even give different orders of

Translators. To undertake to aid in diffusing the version of Homer to the

ends of the West, would ask an Englishman tolerably confident in his own

powers. It breathed in the fiery spirit of George Chapman, who having

rolled out the Iliad in our stateliest numbers, the Odyssey in more

moderate strain, and finally dispatched the Homeric _Minora_, begins his

own Epilogue of three consecutive labours, with

"The work that I WAS BORN TO DO IS DONE!"

A little reflection will suggest to many a wishing Translator, that HE is

in danger of rather doing injustice to the celebrity of an admired

original. Incapables! refrain, desist, be dumb.

The use of Translations to the literature that has received them has been

questioned. The native genius and energies of a country may, it has been

feared, be oppressed by the importation of wealth and luxuries. The

Hygeian maxim to remain poor for the sake of health and strength, is hard

to act upon. In another sense, we might rather look upon the introduced

strangers as dangerous rivals, who rouse us to woo with better devotion,

and so are useful. Besides, it looks like a timid policy to refuse to know

what our fellows have done. Milton was not subdued, but inflamed, by

conversing with _all_ the great originals. Burns did not the less

Dorically tune his reed, because Pope had sounded in his ear echoes of the

Scamandrian trumpet-blast. The truer and more encouraging doctrine rather

seems to be, that if the land has in its mould the right nurture of

genius, genius will strike its roots, and lift its flowers. In the mean

time, it is to be considered, against such a policy of jealous protection,

that _not_ the influence on the vernacular literature is the first

legitimate claim, but the gain of enlightenment for the human mind, intent

upon enlarging itself by bringing under ken _every where_ that which

itself has been, and that which itself has done _every where_.

The great distinction which we have observed in these remarks on

Translation, between compositions in Prose and Verse, seems here to demand

from us some remarks. A question of the very highest importance in

literature arises--can the Fictitious which the poet relates in Verse be

as well related in Prose? The voice of all ages, countries, languages,

answers--NO! The literature of every civilized nation presents this

phenomenon--a division broad and deep, running through it, and marked by

that distinction in the musical structure of discourse, which we

habitually designate by the names, Prose and Verse. The distinction, as we

all know, is as decided in the substance itself of the composition, as it

is in the musical putting together of the words. Homer, Pindar, Alcaeus,

AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, or Lucretius, Virgil,

Horace, Ovid, upon the one side; and upon the other, Herodotus and

Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato, and the Stagyrite--or under another still

fortunate sky, Livy, Caesar, Tacitus, Cicero and Seneca--here bare names of

the poets on the one side, of the writers of prose on the other, express

alike to our soberest judgment, and to our most awakened enthusiasm,

nothing less than two distinct _Worlds of Thinking_.