given in the history of Henry Welby, the Hermit of Grub Street, who died
in 1638, at the age of eighty-four. This example affords "an eccentric
illustration of one of those phases of human nature out of which the
anchoretic life has sprung. When forty years old, Welby was assailed, in
a moment of anger, by a younger brother, with a loaded pistol. It
flashed in the pan. 'Thinking of the danger he had escaped, he fell into
many deep considerations, on the which he grounded an irrevocable
resolution to live alone.' He had wealth and position, and was of a
social temper; but the shock he had undergone had made him distrustful
and meditative, not malignant nor wretched, and engendered in him a
purpose of surpassing tenacity. He had three chambers, one within
another, prepared for his solitude; the first for his diet, the second
for his lodging, the third for his study. While his food was set on the
table by one of his servants, he retired into his sleeping-room; and,
while his bed was making, into his study; and so on, until all was
clear. 'There he set up his rest, and, in forty-four years, never upon
any occasion issued out of those chambers till he was borne thence upon
men's shoulders. Neither, in all that time, did any human being--save,
on some rare necessity, his ancient maid-servant--look upon his face.'
Supplied with the best new books in various languages, he devoted
himself unto prayers and reading. He inquired out objects of charity and
sent them relief. He would spy from his chamber, by a private prospect
into the street, any sick, lame, or weak passing by, and send comforts
and money to them. 'His hair, by reason no barber came near him for the
space of so many years, was so much overgrown at the time of his death,
that he appeared rather like an eremite of the wilderness than an
inhabitant of a city.'"
Welby must have possessed the jewel which this incident, related by
Izaak Walton in his Angler, discovers to be so indispensable. "I knew a
man," he says, "that had health and riches and several houses, all
beautiful and ready furnished, and would often trouble himself and
family to be removing from one house to another; and, being asked by a
friend why he removed so often from one house to another, replied, 'It
was to find content in some one of them.' 'Content,' said his friend,
'ever dwells in a meek and quiet soul.'"
"It's no in titles nor in rank;
It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank,
To purchase peace and rest;
It's no in making muckle mair:
It's no in books; it's no in lear,
To make us truly blest:
If happiness hae not her seat
And centre in the breast,
We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest:
Nae treasures, nor pleasures,
Could make us happy lang;
The heart aye's the part aye,
That makes us right or wrang."
Out of mud, say the Orientalists, springs the lotus flower; out of clay
comes gold and many precious things; out of oysters the pearls;
brightest silks, to robe fairest forms, are spun by a worm; bezoar from
the bull, musk from the deer, are produced; from a stick is born flame;
from the jungle comes sweetest honey. As from sources of little worth
come the precious things of earth, even so is it with hearts that hold
their fortune within. They need not lofty birth or noble kin. Their
victory is recorded. A rain-drop, they say, fell into the sea. "I am
lost!" it cried; "what am I in such a sea?" Into the shell of a gaping
oyster it fell, and there was formed into the orient pearl which now
shines fairest in Britain's diadem. Humility creates the worth it
underrates. "By two things," says the author of the Imitation, "a man is
lifted up from things earthly, namely, by simplicity and purity. A pure
heart penetrateth heaven and hell. Such as every one is inwardly, so he
judgeth outwardly. If there be joy in the world, surely a man of a pure
heart possesseth it.... Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men;
for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account
other than thyself. He that careth not to please men, nor feareth to
displease them, shall enjoy much peace.... He enjoyeth great
tranquillity of heart, that careth neither for the praise nor dispraise
of men. If thou consider what thou art in thyself, thou wilt not care
what men say of thee. Man looketh on the countenance, but God on the
heart. Man considereth the deeds, but God weigheth the intentions."
"Will you not be very glad to know," wrote Eugenie de Guerin to her
brother, in Paris, "that I have just been spending a pleasant quarter of
an hour on the terrace-steps, seated by the side of an old woman, who
was singing me a lamentable ballad on an event that occurred long ago at
Cahuzac? This came about apropos of a gold cross that has been stolen
from the neck of the blessed Virgin. The old woman remembered her
grandmother telling her that she had heard in olden times of this same
church being the scene of a still more sacrilegious robbery, since it
was then the blessed sacrament that was carried off one day when it was
left exposed in the empty church. A young girl came to the altar while
everybody was busy in the harvest, and, mounting upon it, put the pyx
into her apron, and went and placed it under a rose-tree in a wood. The
shepherds who discovered it told where it was, and nine priests came in
procession to adore the blessed sacrament under the rose-tree, and to
carry it back to the church. But for all that, the poor shepherdess was
arrested, tried, and condemned to be burned. Just when about to die, she
requested to confess, and owned the fact to a priest; but it was not,
she said, because of any thievish propensities she took it, but that she
wanted to have the blessed sacrament in the forest. 'I thought that the
good God would be as satisfied under a rose-tree as on an altar.' At
these words an angel descended from heaven to announce her pardon, and
to comfort the pious criminal, who was burnt on a stake, of which the
rose-tree formed the first fagot." There is a tradition that one night,
Gabriel, from his seat in paradise, heard the voice of God sweetly
responding to a human heart. The angel said, "Surely this must be an
eminent servant of the Most High, whose spirit is dead to lust and lives
on high." The angel hastened over land and sea to find this man, but
could not find him in the earth or heavens. At last he exclaimed, "O
Lord, show me the way to the object of thy love!" God answered, "Turn
thy steps to yon village, and in that pagoda thou shalt behold him." The
angel sped to the pagoda, and therein found a solitary man kneeling
before an idol. Returning, he cried, "O master of the world! hast thou
looked with love on a man who invokes an idol in a pagoda?" God said, "I
consider not the error of ignorance: this heart, amid its darkness, hath
the highest place."
Anaxagoras, whose disciples were Socrates and Pericles and Euripides, in
reply to a question, said he believed those to be most happy who seem
least to be so; and that we must not look among the rich and great for
persons who taste true happiness, but among those who till a small piece
of ground, or apply themselves to the sciences, without ambition. "The
fairest lives, in my opinion," said Montaigne, "are those which
regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model, without
miracle, without extravagance." "If some great men," said Mandeville,
"had not a superlative pride, and everybody understood the enjoyment of
life, who would be a lord chancellor, a prime minister, or a grand
pensionary?" There is in existence a precious old album containing the
handwriting of many renowned men, such as Luther, Erasmus, Mosheim, and
others. The last-mentioned has written, in Latin, the following
remarkable words: "Renown is a source of toil and sorrow; obscurity is a
source of happiness." "Does he not drink more sweetly that takes his
beverage in an earthen vessel," asks Jeremy Taylor, "than he that looks
and searches into his golden chalices, for fear of poison, and looks
pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armor, and trusts nobody, and
does not trust God for safety?"
"The world," said Goethe, "could not exist, if it were not so simple.
This ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever
the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green
again."
"Everything has its own limits," says Hazlitt, "a little centre of its
own, round which it moves; so that our true wisdom lies in our keeping
in our own walk in life, however humble or obscure, and being satisfied
if we can succeed in it. The best of us can do no more, and we shall
only become ridiculous or unhappy by attempting it. We are ashamed
because we are at a loss in things to which we have no pretensions, and
try to remedy our mistakes by committing greater. An overweening vanity
or self-opinion is, in truth, often at the bottom of this weakness; and
we shall be most likely to conquer the one by eradicating the other, or
restricting it within due and moderate bounds."
In the Imaginary Conversations, Aspasia asks Pericles: "Is there any
station so happy as an uncontested place in a small community, where
manners are simple, where wants are few, where respect is the tribute of
probity, and love is the guerdon of beneficence?"
"From my tutor," said the good emperor Marcus Aurelius, "I learnt
endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands,
and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to
listen to slander."
"Ah!" exclaimed the Attic Philosopher, "if men but knew in what a small
dwelling joy can live, and how little it costs to furnish it!... Does a
man drink more when he drinks from a large glass? From whence comes that
universal dread of mediocrity, the fruitful mother of peace and liberty?
Ah! there is the evil which, above every other, it should be the aim of
both public and private education to anticipate! If that were got rid
of, what treasons would be spared, what baseness avoided, what a chain
of excess and crime would be forever broken! We award the palm to
charity, and to self-sacrifice: but, above all, let us award it to
moderation, for it is the great social virtue. Even when it does not
create the others, it stands instead of them." Socrates used to say that
the man who ate with the greatest appetite had the least need of
delicacies; and that he who drank with the greatest appetite was the
least inclined to look for a draught which is not at hand; and that
those who want fewest things are nearest to the gods. Milton says that
the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he
who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water
out of a golden bowl. "Have you never noticed," said Hiero, "all the
multitudinous contrivances which are set before tyrants, acid, and
harsh, and sour; and whatsoever else there can be of the same kind?" "To
be sure I have," said Simonides; "and all these things appeared to me to
be very contrary to the natural taste of any man." "And do you think,"
said Hiero, "that these dishes are anything else but the fancies of a
diseased and vitiated taste; since those who eat with appetite, you well
know, have no need of these contrivances and provocatives?" Michel
Angelo seldom partook of the enjoyments of the table, and used to say,
"However rich I may have been, I have always lived as a poor man." Said
Seneca, "He that lives according to nature cannot be poor, and he that
exceeds can never have enough." Epicurus said, "I feed sweetly upon
bread and water, those sweet and easy provisions of the body, and I defy
the pleasures of costly provisions." Cardinal Mancini staying once on a
visit to Poussin till it was dark, the artist took the candle in his
hand, lighted him down-stairs, and waited upon him to his coach. The
prelate was sorry to see him do it himself, and could not help saying,
"I very much pity you, Poussin, that you have not one servant." "And I
pity you more, my lord," replied Poussin, "that you have so many." "No
man needs to flatter," said Jeremy Taylor, "if he can live as nature did
intend. He need not swell his accounts, and intricate his spirit with
arts of subtlety and contrivance; he can be free from fears, and the
chances of the world cannot concern him. All our trouble is from within
us; and if a dish of lettuce and a clear fountain can cool all my heats,
so that I shall have neither thirst nor pride, lust nor revenge, envy
nor ambition, I am lodged in the bosom of felicity."
"Prosperity," says Froude, in one of his essays, "is consistent with
intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart;
while the grander features of human character,--self-sacrifice,
disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any
great and good cause,--these have no tendency to bring men what is
called fortune. They do not even necessarily promote their happiness;
for do what they will in this way, the horizon of what they desire to do
perpetually flies before them. High hopes and enthusiasms are generally
disappointed in results; and the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchedness
of all kinds which forever prevail among mankind,--the short-comings in
himself of which he becomes more conscious as he becomes really
better,--these things, you may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man
from ever being particularly happy." "I should rather say," he says in
another essay, "that the Scots had been an unusually happy people.
Intelligent industry, the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that
it must be done well, under penalties; the necessaries of life
moderately provided for; and a sensible content with the situation of
life in which men are born--this through the week, and at the end of it
the Cotter's Saturday Night--the homely family, gathered reverently and
peacefully together, and irradiated with a sacred presence. Happiness!
such happiness as we human creatures are likely to know upon this world
will be found there, if anywhere."
"On the Simplon," says a German traveler, "amid the desert of snow and
mist, in the vicinity of a refuge, a boy and his little sister were
journeying up the mountain by the side of our carriage. Both had on
their backs little baskets filled with wood, which they had gathered in
the lower mountains, where there is still some vegetation. The boy gave
us some specimens of rock crystal and other stone, for which we gave him
some small coins. The delight with which he cast stolen glances at his
money, as he passed by our carriage, made upon me an indelible
impression. Never before had I seen such a heavenly expression of
felicity. I could not but reflect that God had placed all sources and
capabilities for happiness in the human heart; and that, with respect to
happiness, it is perfectly indifferent how and where one dwells."
"A man," says Cumberland, "who is gifted with worldly qualities and
accommodations is armed with hands, as a ship with grappling-irons,
ready to catch hold of, and make himself fast to everything he comes in
contact with, and such a man, with all these properties of adhesion, has
also the property, like the polypus, of a most miraculous and
convenient indivisibility; cut off his hold--nay, cut him how you will,
he is still a polypus, whole and entire. Men of this sort still work
their way out of their obscurity like cockroaches out of the hold of a
ship, and crawl into notice, nay, even into kings' palaces, as the frogs
did into Pharaoh's; the happy faculty of noting times and seasons, and a
lucky promptitude to avail themselves of moments with address and
boldness, are alone such all-sufficient requisites, such marketable
stores of worldly knowledge, that, although the minds of those who own
them shall be, as to all the liberal sciences, a rasa tabula, yet
knowing these things needful to be known, let their difficulties and
distresses be what they may, though the storm of adversity threatens to
overwhelm them, they are in a life-boat, buoyed up by corks, and cannot
sink. These are the stray children turned loose upon the world, whom
Fortune, in her charity, takes charge of, and for whose guidance in the
by-ways and cross-roads of their pilgrimage she sets up fairy
finger-posts, discoverable by those whose eyes are near the ground, but
unperceived by such whose looks are raised above it."
"Genial manners are good," says Emerson, "and power of accommodation to
any circumstance; but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a
man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in
employment and happiness,--whether it be to make baskets, or
broad-swords, or canals, or statues, or songs."
Wordsworth's man-servant, James, was brought up in a work-house, and at
nine years of age was turned out of the house with two shillings in his
pocket. When without a six-pence, he was picked up by a farmer, who took
him into his service on condition that all his clothes should be burnt
(they were so filthy); and he was to pay for his new clothes out of his
wages of two pounds ten shillings per annum. Here he stayed as long as
he was wanted. "I have been so lucky," said James, "that I was never
out of a place a day in my life, for I was always taken into service
immediately. I never got into a scrape, or was drunk in my life, for I
never taste any liquor. So that I have often said, I consider myself as
a favorite of fortune!" This is like Goldsmith's cripple in the park,
who, remarking upon his appealing wretchedness, said, "'Tis not every
man that can be born with a golden spoon in his mouth."
"Arrogance," said Goethe, "is natural to youth. A man believes, in his
youth, that the world properly began with him, and that all exists for
his sake. In the East, there was a man who, every morning, collected his
people about him, and never would go to work till he had commanded the
sun to arise. But he was wise enough not to speak his command till the
sun of its own accord was ready to appear." "At the outset of life,"
says Hazlitt, "our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state
between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses
of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than
what we see. As in our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and
reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed,
and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with
thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong
pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and
good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We
are no longer wrapped in lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the
pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls, and nothing
is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what has been!"
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparel'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
"The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth."
"Why," asks Souvestre, "is there so much confidence at first, so much
doubt at last? Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make
it unfit for happiness? Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we
would preserve hope? Is the world, and is the individual man, intended,
after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?"
"If the world does improve on the whole," said Goethe, "yet youth must
always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the
beginning." But, "'tis a great advantage of rank," said Pascal, "that a
man at eighteen or twenty shall be allowed the same esteem and deference
which another purchaseth by his merit at fifty. Here are thirty years
gained at a stroke."
"The whole employment of men's lives," said the same thinker, "is to
improve their fortunes; and yet the title by which they hold all, if
traced to its origin, is no more than the pure fancy of the legislators:
but their possession is still more precarious than their right, and at
the mercy of a thousand accidents: nor are the treasures of the mind
better insured; while a fall, or a fit of sickness, may bankrupt the
ablest understanding.... Caesar was too old, in my opinion, to amuse
himself with projecting the conquest of the world. Such an imagination
was excusable in Alexander, a prince full of youth and fire, and not
easy to be checked in his hopes. But Caesar ought to have been more
grave."
"Knowledge has two extremities, which meet and touch each other," says
Pascal, again. "The first of them is pure, natural ignorance, such as
attends every man at his birth. The other is the perfection attained by
great souls, who, having run through the circle of all that mankind can
know, find at length that they know nothing, and are contented to return
to that ignorance from which they set out. Ignorance that thus knows
itself is a wise and learned ignorance."
"That is ever the difference," said Emerson, "between the wise and the
unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at
the usual."
It has been said that the visitor, climbing the white roof of the Milan
cathedral, and gazing on the forest of statues, "feels as though a
flight of angels had alighted there and been struck to marble." "At the
top of his mind," says Alger, "the devout scholar has a holy of holies,
a little pantheon set round with altars and the images of the greatest
men. Every day, putting on a priestly robe, he retires into this temple
and passes before its shrines and shapes. Here he feels a thrill of awe;
there he lays a burning aspiration; farther on he swings a censer of
reverence. To one he lifts a look of love; at the feet of another he
drops a grateful tear; and before another still, a flush of pride and
joy suffuses him. They smile on him: sometimes they speak and wave their
solemn hands. Always they look up to the Highest. Purified and hallowed,
he gathers his soul together, and comes away from the worshipful
intercourse, serious, serene, glad, and strong."
"Men," says St. Augustine, "travel far to climb high mountains, to
observe the majesty of the ocean, to trace the sources of rivers, but
they neglect themselves." "Admirable reasoning! admirable lesson!"
exclaimed Petrarch, as he closed the Confessions upon the passage when
on the summit of the Alps. "If," said he, "I have undergone so much
labor in climbing this mountain that my body might be nearer to heaven,
what ought I not to do in order that my soul may be received into those
immortal regions?"
Hear this lofty strain of the old heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius:
"Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a
mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was
meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is
better than to live as men do."
"As soon as a man," says Max Mueller, "becomes conscious of himself as
distinct from all other things and persons, he at the same moment
becomes conscious of a Higher Self, a higher power, without which he
feels that neither he nor anything else would have any life or reality."
"To live, indeed," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is to be again ourselves,
which being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers, 'tis all
one to lie in St. Innocent's church-yard, as in the sands of Egypt;
ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with
six feet as the moles of Adrianus."
"At the age of seventy-five," said Goethe, "one must, of course, think
frequently of death. But this thought never gives me the least
uneasiness, I am so fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and
that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun,
which seems to our earthly eyes to set in night, but is in reality gone
to diffuse its light elsewhere."
"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light thro' chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new."
Amongst the poems of Mrs. Barbauld is a stanza on Life, written in
extreme old age. Madame D'Arblay told the poet Rogers that she repeated
it every night. Wordsworth once said to a visitor, "Repeat me that
stanza by Mrs. Barbauld." His friend did so. Wordsworth made him repeat
it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in
his sitting-room at Rydal, with his hands behind him, and was heard to
mutter to himself, "I am not in the habit of grudging people their good
things, but I wish I had written those lines."
"Life! we've been long together,
Thro' pleasant and thro' cloudy weather:
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear:
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me good-morning."
XIII.
RELIGION.
"Ah!" sighed Shelley to Leigh Hunt, as the organ was playing in the
cathedral at Pisa, "what a divine religion might be found out if charity
were really made the principle of it instead of faith."