“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”
Ford lingers-out his heart-breaks too much. He recalls to my mind a
speech of Calianax in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy:” “You
have all fine new tricks to grieve. But I ne’er knew any but direct
crying.” One is tempted to prefer the peremptory way in which the old
ballad-mongers dealt with such matters:--
“She turned her face unto the wa’,
And there her very heart it brak.”
I cannot bid you farewell without thanking you for the patience with
which you have followed me to the end. I may have seemed sometimes to
be talking to you of things that would weigh but as thistle-down in the
great business-scales of life. But I have an old opinion, strengthening
with years, that it is as important to keep the soul alive as the
body: nay, that it is the life of the soul which gives all its value
to that of the body. Poetry is a criticism of life only in the sense
that it furnishes us with the standard of a more ideal felicity, of
calmer pleasures and more majestic pains. I am glad to see that what
the understanding would stigmatize as useless is coming back into books
written for children, which at one time threatened to become more and
more drearily practical and didactic. The fairies are permitted once
more to imprint their rings on the tender sward of the child’s fancy,
and it is the child’s fancy that often lives obscurely on to minister
solace to the lonelier and less sociable mind of the man. Our nature
resents the closing up of the windows on its emotional and imaginative
side, and revenges itself as it can. I have observed that many who
deny the inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their balance by
giving a reverent credit to the revelations of inspired tables and
camp-stools. In a last analysis it may be said that it is to the sense
of Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and of the Imagination
appeals. I am told that this sense is the survival in us of some savage
ancestor of the age of flint. If so, I am thankful to him for his
longevity, or his transmitted nature, whichever it may be. But I have
my own suspicion sometimes that the true age of flint is before, and
not behind us, an age hardening itself more and more to those subtle
influences which ransom our lives from the captivity of the actual,
from that dungeon whose warder is the Giant Despair. Yet I am consoled
by thinking that the siege of Troy will be remembered when those of
Vicksburg and Paris are forgotten. One of the old dramatists, Thomas
Heywood, has, without meaning it, set down for us the uses of the
poets:--
“They cover us with counsel to defend us
From storms without; they polish us within
With learning, knowledge, arts, and disciplines;
All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us
Like dust and cobwebs; our rooms concealed
Hang with the costliest hangings ’bout the walls,
Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round.”