hidden in blossoms, and the tree put forth beautiful promise. Cold winds
blew, and clouds intercepted the sunshine; but it felt the dews of
heaven, and kept flourishing fair even in the moonlight, deriving sweet
sustenance from the stars. But would all those blossoms have been fruit?
Many would have formed, but more perhaps dropt in unperceived decay, and
the tree which "all eyes that looked on loved," might not have been the
pride of the garden. Death could not permit the chance of such
disappointment, stepped kindly in, and left the spring-dream "sweet but
mournful to the soul," among its half-fancied memories. Such was the
fate, perhaps, of Henry Kirke White. His fine moral and intellectual
being was not left to pine away neglected; and if, in gratitude and
ambition, twin-births in that noble heart, he laid down his life for
sake of the lore he loved, let us lament the dead with no passionate
ejaculations over injustice by none committed, console ourselves with
the thought, in noways unkind to his merits, that he died in a mild
bright spring that might have been succeeded by no very glorious summer;
and that, fading away as he did among the tears of the good and great,
his memory has been embalmed, not only in his own gentle inspirations,
but in the immortal eulogy of Southey. But, alas! many thus endowed by
nature "have waged with fortune an unequal war;" and pining away in
poverty and disappointment, have died broken-hearted--and been
buried--some in unhonoured, some even in unwept graves! And how many
have had a far more dismal lot, because their life was not so innocent!
The children of misfortune, but of error too--of frailty, vice, and sin.
Once gone astray, with much to tempt them on, and no voice, no hand, to
draw them back, theirs has been at first a flowery descent to death, but
soon sorely beset with thorns, lacerating the friendless wretches, till,
with shame and remorse their sole attendants, they have tottered into
uncoffined holes and found peace.
With sorrows and sufferings like these, it would be hardly fair to blame
society at large for having little or no sympathy; for they are, in the
most affecting cases, borne in silence, and are unknown even to the
generous and humane in their own neighbourhood, who might have done
something or much to afford encouragement or relief. Nor has Charity
always neglected those who so well deserved her open hand, and in their
virtuous poverty might, without abatement of honourable pride in
themselves, have accepted silent succour to silent distress. Pity that
her blessings should be so often intercepted by worthless applicants, on
their way, it may be said, to the magnanimous who have not applied at
all, but spoken to her heart in a silent language, which was not meant
even to express the penury it betrayed. But we shall never believe that
dew twice blessed seldom descends, in such a land as ours, on the noble
young head that else had sunk like a chance flower in some dank shade,
left to wither among weeds. We almost venture to say, that much of such
unpitied, because often unsuspected suffering, cannot cease to be
without a change in the moral government of the world.
Nor has Genius a right to claim from Conscience what is due but to
Virtue. None who love humanity can wish to speak harshly of its mere
frailties or errors--but none who revere morality can allow privilege to
its sins. All who sin suffer, with or without genius; and we are nowhere
taught in the New Testament, that remorse in its agony, and penitence in
its sorrow, visit men's imaginations only; but whatever way they enter,
their rueful dwelling is in the heart. Poets shed no bitterer tears than
ordinary men; and Fonblanque finely showed us, in one of his late little
essays, clear as wells and deep as tarns, that so far from there being
anything in the constitution of genius naturally kindred either to vice
or misery, it is framed of light and love and happiness, and that its
sins and sufferings come not from the spirit but from the flesh. Yet is
its flesh as firm as, and perhaps somewhat finer than, that of the
common clay; but still it is clay--for all men are dust.
But what if they who, on the ground of genius, claim exemption from our
blame, and inclusion within our sympathies, even when seen suffering
from their own sins, have no genius at all, but are mere ordinary men,
and but for the fumes of some physical excitement, which they mistake
for the airs of inspiration, are absolutely stupider than people
generally go, and even without any tolerable abilities for alphabetical
education? Many such run versifying about, and will not try to settle
down into any easy sedentary trade, till, getting thirsty through
perpetual perspiration, they take to drinking, come to you with
subscription-papers for poetry, with a cock in their eye that tells of
low tippling-houses, and, accepting your half-crown, slander you when
melting it in the purling purlieus of their own donkey-browsed
Parnassus.
Can this age be fairly charged--we speak of England and Scotland--with a
shameful indifference--or worse--a cruel scorn--or worse still--a
barbarous persecution of young persons of humble birth, in whom there
may appear a promise of talent, or of genius? Many are the scholars in
whom their early benefactors have had reason to be proud of themselves,
while they have been happy to send their sons to be instructed in the
noblest lore, by men whose boyhood they had rescued from the darkness of
despair, and clothed it with the warmth and light of hope. And were we
to speak of endowments in schools and colleges, in which so many fine
scholars have been brought up from among the humbler classes, who but
for them had been bred to some mean handicraft, we should show better
reason still for believing that moral and intellectual worth is not
overlooked, or left to pine neglected in obscure places, as it is too
much the fashion with a certain set of discontented declaimers to give
out; but that in no other country has such provision been made for the
meritorious children of the enlightened poor as in England. But we fear
that the talent and the genius which, according to them, have been so
often left or sent to beggary, to the great reproach even of our
national character, have not been of a kind which a thoughtful humanity
would in its benefactions have recognised; for it looks not with very
hopeful eyes on mere irregular sallies of fancy, least of all when
spurning prudence and propriety, and symptomatic of a mental
constitution easily excited, but averse to labour, and insensible to the
delight labour brings with it, when the faculties are all devoted in
steadfastness of purpose to the acquisition of knowledge and the
attainment of truth.
'Tis not easy to know, seeing it is so difficult to define it, whether
this or that youth who thinks he has genius, has it or not: the only
proof he may have given of it is perhaps a few copies of verses, which
breathe the animal gladness of young life, and are tinged with tints of
the beautiful, which joy itself, more imaginative than it ever again
will be, steals from the sunset; but sound sense, and judgment, and
taste which is sense and judgment of all finest feelings and thoughts,
and the love of light dawning on the intellect, and ability to gather
into knowledge facts near and from afar, till the mind sees systems, and
in them understands the phenomena which, when looked at singly,
perplexed the pleasure of the sight--these, and aptitudes and capacities
and powers such as these, are indeed of promise, and more than promise;
they are already performance, and justify in minds thus gifted, and in
those who watch their workings, hopes of a wiser and happier future when
the boy shall be a man.
Perhaps too much honour, rather than too little, has been shown by this
age to mediocre poetry and other works of fiction. A few gleams of
genius have given some writers of little worth a considerable
reputation; and great waxed the pride of poetasters. But true poetry
burst in beauty over the land, and we became intolerant of "false
glitter." Fresh sprang its flowers from the "daedal earth," or seemed,
they were so surpassingly beautiful, as if spring had indeed descended
from heaven, "veiled in a shower of shadowing roses," and no longer
could we suffer young gentlemen and ladies, treading among the
profusion, to gather the glorious scatterings, and weaving them into
fantastic or even tasteful garlands, to present them to us, as if they
had been raised from the seed of their own genius, and entitled
therefore "to bear their name in the wild woods." This flower-gathering,
pretty pastime though it be, and altogether innocent, fell into
disrepute; and then all such florists began to complain of being
neglected, or despised, or persecuted, and their friends to lament over
their fate, the fate of all genius, "in amorous ditties all a summer's
day."
Besides the living poets of highest rank, are there not many whose
claims to join the sacred band have been allowed, because their lips,
too, have sometimes been touched with a fire from heaven? Second-rate
indeed! Ay, well for those who are third, fourth, or fifth rate--knowing
where sit Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Round about Parnassus run
_many_ parallel roads, with forests of "cedar and branching palm"
between, overshadowing the sunshine on each magnificent level with a
sense of something more sublime still nearer the forked summit; and each
band, so that they be not ambitious overmuch, in their own region may
wander or repose in grateful bliss. Thousands look up with envy from
"the low-lying fields of the beautiful land" immediately without the
line that goes wavingly asweep round the base of the holy mountain,
separating it from the common earth. What clamour and what din from the
excluded crowd! Many are heard there to whom nature has been kind, but
they have not yet learned "to know themselves," or they would retire,
but not afar off, and in silence adore. And so they do ere long, and are
happy in the sight of "the beauty still more beauteous" revealed to
their fine perceptions, though to them was not given the faculty that by
combining in spiritual passion creates. But what has thither brought the
self-deceived, who will not be convinced of their delusion, even were
Homer or Milton's very self to frown on them with eyes no longer dim,
but angry in their brightness like lowering stars?
But we must beware--perhaps too late--of growing unintelligible, and ask
you, in plainer terms, if you do not think that by far the greatest
number of all those who raise an outcry against the injustice of the
world to men of genius, are persons of the meanest abilities, who have
all their lives been foolishly fighting with their stars? Their demons
have not whispered to them "have a taste," but "you have genius," and
the world gives the demons the lie. Thence anger, spite, rancour, and
envy eat their hearts, and they "rail against the Lord's anointed." They
set up idols of clay, and fall down and worship them--or idols of brass,
more worthless than clay; or they perversely, and in hatred, not in
love, pretend reverence for the Fair and Good, because, forsooth, placed
by man's ingratitude too far in the shade, whereas man's pity has, in
deep compassion, removed the objects of their love, because of their
imperfections not blameless, back in among that veiling shade, that
their beauty might still be visible while their deformities were hidden
in "a dim religious light."
Let none of the sons or daughters of genius hearken to such outcry but
with contempt--and at all times with suspicion, when they find
themselves the objects of such lamentations. The world is not--at least
does not wish to be an unkind, ungenerous, and unjust world. Many who
think themselves neglected, are far more thought of than they suppose;
just as many who imagine the world ringing with their name, are in the
world's ears nearly anonymous. Only one edition or two of your poems
have sold--but is it not pretty well that five hundred or a thousand
copies have been read, or glanced over, or looked at, or skimmed, or
skipped, or fondled, or petted, or tossed aside "between malice and true
love," by ten times that number of your fellow-creatures, not one of
whom ever saw your face; while many millions of men, nearly your equals,
and not a few millions your superiors far, have contentedly dropt into
the grave, at the close of a long life, without having once "invoked the
Muse," and who would have laughed in your face had you talked to them,
even in their greatest glee, about their genius?
There is a glen in the Highlands (dearly beloved Southrons, call on us,
on your way through Edinburgh, and we shall delight to instruct you how
to walk our mountains) called Glencro--very unlike Glenco. A good road
winds up the steep ascent, and at the summit there is a stone seat on
which you read "_Rest and be thankful_." You do so--and are not a little
proud--if pedestrians--of your achievement. Looking up, you see cliffs
high above your head (not the Cobbler), and in the clear sky, as far
above them, a balanced bird. You envy him his seemingly motionless
wings, and wonder at his air-supporters. Down he darts, or aside he
shoots, or right up he soars, and you wish you were an Eagle. You have
reached Rest-and-be-thankful, yet rest you will not, and thankful you
will not be, and you scorn the mean inscription, which many a worthier
wayfarer has blessed, while sitting on that stone he has said, "give us
this day our daily bread," eat his crust, and then walked away contented
down to Cairndow. Just so has it been with you sitting at your appointed
place--pretty high up--on the road to the summit of the Biforked Hill.
You look up and see Byron--there "sitting where you may not soar,"--and
wish you were a great Poet. But you are no more a great Poet than an
Eagle eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip--and will not
rest-and-be-thankful that you are a man and a Christian. Nay, you are
more, an author of no mean repute; and your prose is allowed to be
excellent, better far than the best paragraph in this our Morning
Monologue. But you are sick of walking, and nothing will satisfy you but
to fly. Be contented, as we are, with feet, and weep not for wings; and
let us take comfort together from a cheering quotation from the
philosophic Gray--
"For they that creep and they that fly,
Just end where they began!"
THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.
A May-morning on Ulswater and the banks of Ulswater--commingled earth
and heaven! Spring is many-coloured as Autumn; but now Joy scatters the
hues daily brightening into greener life, then Melancholy dropt them
daily dimming into yellower death. The fear of Winter then--but now the
hope of Summer; and Nature rings with hymns hailing the visible advent
of the perfect year. If for a moment the woods are silent, it is but to
burst forth anew into louder song. The rain is over and gone--but the
showery sky speaks in the streams on a hundred hills; and the wide
mountain gloom opens its heart to the sunshine that on many a dripping
precipice burns like fire. Nothing seems inanimate. The very clouds and
their shadows look alive--the trees, never dead, are wide-awakened from
their sleep--families of flowers are frequenting all the dewy
places--old walls are splendid with the light of lichens--and
birch-crowned cliffs up among the coves send down their fine fragrance
to the Lake on every bolder breath that whitens with breaking wavelets
the blue of its breezy bosom. Nor mute the voice of man. The shepherd is
whooping on the hill--the ploughman calling to his team somewhere among
the furrows in some small late field, won from the woods; and you hear
the laughter, and the echoes of the laughter--one sound--of children
busied in half-work half-play; for what else in vernal sunshine is the
occupation of young rustic life? 'Tis no Arcadia--no golden age. But a
lovelier scene--in the midst of all its grandeur--is not in merry and
majestic England; nor did the hills of this earth ever circumscribe a
pleasanter dwelling for a nobler peasantry, than these Cumbrian ranges
of rocks and pastures, where the raven croaks in his own region,
unregarded in theirs by the fleecy flocks. How beautiful the Church
Tower!
On a knoll not far from the shore, and not high above the water, yet by
an especial felicity of place gently commanding all that reach of the
Lake with all its ranges of mountains--every single tree, every grove,
and all the woods seeming to show or to conceal the scene at the bidding
of the Spirit of Beauty--reclined two Figures--the one almost rustic,
but venerable in the simplicity of old age--the other no longer young,
but still in the prime of life--and though plainly apparelled, with form
and bearing such as are pointed out in cities, because belonging to
distinguished men. The old man behaved towards him with deference, but
not humility; and between them two--in many things unlike--it was clear
even from their silence that there was friendship.
A little way off, and sometimes almost running, now up and now down the
slopes and hollows, was a girl about eight years old--whether beautiful
or not you could not know, for her face was either half-hidden in golden
hair, or when she tossed the tresses from her brow, it was so bright in
the sunshine that you saw no features, only a gleam of joy. Now she was
chasing the butterflies, not to hurt them, but to get a nearer sight of
their delicate gauze wings--the first that had come--she wondered
whence--to waver and wanton for a little while in the spring sunshine,
and then, she felt, as wondrously, one and all, as by consent, to
vanish. And now she stooped as if to pull some little wildflower, her
hand for a moment withheld by a loving sense of its loveliness, but ever
and anon adding some new colour to the blended bloom intended to gladden
her father's eyes--though the happy child knew full well, and sometimes
wept to know, that she herself had his entire heart. Yet gliding, or
tripping, or dancing along, she touched not with fairy foot one white
clover-flower on which she saw working the silent bee. Her father looked
too often sad, and she feared--though what it was, she imagined not even
in dreams--that some great misery must have befallen him before they
came to live in the glen. And such, too, she had heard from a chance
whisper, was the belief of their neighbours. But momentary the shadows
on the light of childhood! Nor was she insensible to her own beauty,
that with the innocence it enshrined combined to make her happy; and
first met her own eyes every morning, when most beautiful, awakening
from the hushed awe of her prayers. She was clad in russet like a
cottager's child; but her air spoke of finer breeding than may be met
with among those mountains--though natural grace accompanies there many
a maiden going with her pitcher to the well--and gentle blood and old
flows there in the veins of now humble men--who, but for the decay of
families once high, might have lived in halls, now dilapidated, and
scarcely distinguished through masses of ivy from the circumjacent
rocks!
The child stole close behind her father, and kissing his cheek, said,
"Were there ever such lovely flowers seen in Ulswater before, father? I
do not believe that they will ever die." And she put them in his breast.
Not a smile came to his countenance--no look of love--no faint
recognition--no gratitude for the gift which at other times might haply
have drawn a tear. She stood abashed in the sternness of his eyes,
which, though fixed on her, seemed to see her not; and feeling that her
glee was mistimed--for with such gloom she was not unfamiliar--the child
felt as if her own happiness had been sin, and, retiring into a glade
among the broom, sat down and wept.
"Poor wretch, better far that she never had been born."
The old man looked on his friend with compassion, but with no surprise;
and only said, "God will dry up her tears."
These few simple words, uttered in a solemn voice, but without one tone
of reproach, seemed somewhat to calm the other's trouble, who first
looking towards the spot where his child was sobbing to herself, though
he heard it not, and then looking up to heaven, ejaculated for her sake
a broken prayer. He then would have fain called her to him; but he was
ashamed that even she should see him in such a passion of grief--and the
old man went to her of his own accord, and bade her, as from her father,
again to take her pastime among the flowers. Soon was she dancing in her
happiness as before; and, that her father might hear she was obeying
him, singing a song.
"For five years every Sabbath have I attended divine service in your
chapel--yet dare I not call myself a Christian. I have prayed for
faith--nor, wretch that I am, am I an unbeliever. But I fear to fling
myself at the foot of the cross. God be merciful to me a sinner!"
The old man opened not his lips; for he felt that there was about to be
made some confession. Yet he doubted not that the sufferer had been more
sinned against than sinning; for the goodness of the stranger--so called
still after five years' residence among the mountains--was known in many
a vale--and the Pastor knew that charity covereth a multitude of
sins--and even as a moral virtue prepares the heart for heaven. So
sacred a thing is solace in this woeful world.
"We have walked together, many hundred times, for great part of a day,
by ourselves two, over long tracts of uninhabited moors, and yet never
once from my lips escaped one word about my fates or fortunes--so frozen
was the secret in my heart. Often have I heard the sound of your voice,
as if it were that of the idle wind; and often the words I did hear
seemed, in the confusion, to have no relation to us, to be strange
syllablings in the wilderness, as from the hauntings of some evil spirit
instigating me to self-destruction."
"I saw that your life was oppressed by some perpetual burden; but God
darkened not your mind while your heart was disturbed so grievously; and
well pleased were we all to think, that in caring so kindly for the
griefs of others, you might come at last to forget your own; or if that
were impossible, to feel, that with the alleviations of time, and
sympathy, and religion, yours was no more than the common lot of
sorrow."
They rose--and continued to walk in silence--but not apart--up and down
that small sylvan enclosure overlooked but by rocks. The child saw her
father's distraction--no unusual sight to her; yet on each recurrence as
mournful and full of fear as if seen for the first time--and pretended
to be playing aloof with her face pale in tears.
"That child's mother is not dead. Where she is now I know not--perhaps
in a foreign country hiding her guilt and her shame. All say that a
lovelier child was never seen than that wretch--God bless her--how
beautiful is the poor creature now in her happiness singing over her
flowers! Just such another must her mother have been at her age. She is
now an outcast--and an adulteress."
The Pastor turned away his face, for in the silence he heard groans, and
the hollow voice again spoke.--
"Through many dismal days and nights have I striven to forgive her, but
never for many hours together have I been enabled to repent my curse.
For on my knees I implored God to curse her--her head--her eyes--her
breast--her body--mind, heart, and soul--and that she might go down a
loathsome leper to the grave."
"Remember what He said to the woman--'Go, and sin no more!'"
"The words have haunted me all up and down the hills--His words and
mine; but mine have always sounded liker justice at last--for my nature
was created human--and human are all the passions that pronounced that
holy or unholy curse!"
"Yet you would not curse her now--were she lying here at your feet--or
if you were standing by her deathbed?"
"Lying here at my feet! Even here--on this very spot--not blasted, but
green through all the year--within the shelter of these two rocks--she
did lie at my feet in her beauty--and as I thought her innocence--my own
happy bride! Hither I brought her to be blest--and blest I was even up
to the measure of my misery. This world is hell to me now--but then it
was heaven!"
"These awful names are of the mysteries beyond the grave."
"Hear me and judge. She was an orphan; all her father's and mother's
relations were dead, but a few who were very poor. I married her, and
secured her life against this heartless and wicked world. That child was
born--and while it grew like a flower--she left it--and its father--me
who loved her beyond light and life, and would have given up both for
her sake."
"And have not yet found heart to forgive her--miserable as she needs
must be--seeing she has been a great sinner!"