child-genius, who lived in a world of romance but was driven by
destitution to commit suicide at _seventeen_ years of age. The
above was one of the “Rowley forgeries,” but, for the antique
words which Chatterton used (often incorrectly) to imitate
the language of the Fifteenth Century, modern words have been
substituted where possible.
* * * * *
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years.
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—
“Guess now who holds thee?”—“Death,” I said. But there,
The silver answer rang.—“Not Death, but Love.”
E. B. BROWNING (_Sonnets from the Portuguese_).
This is the first of the chain of sonnets, which Mrs. Browning
called “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” They tell her own
love-story, and were written in secret and without thought of
publication. Robert Browning learnt of them only the year after
the marriage, and then insisted on their being published. They
include some of the finest sonnets in our language.
To appreciate this and the other sonnets, it is necessary to
know the beautiful story of the two poets. Mrs. Browning was
six years older than her husband and a life-long invalid,
expecting, as she says in this sonnet, Death rather than Love.
Their marriage was supremely happy, and the great poet, when in
England, used to visit the church in which they were married to
express his thankfulness. He tells the love-story in the next
quotation.
In these sonnets Mrs. Browning laid bare her innermost feelings.
Robert Browning, however, in several poems says the privacy of
a poet’s life and feelings should not be bared to the public.
Wordsworth had written in 1827:
Scorn not the Sonnet.... With this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
Browning in 1876 (thirty years after the “Sonnets from the
Portuguese” were written) wrote in his poem called _House_:
“_With this same key_
_Shakespeare unlocked his heart_”....
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
Swinburne comments on these lines: “No whit the less like
Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning.”
* * * * *
... Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!...
Hither we walked then, side by side,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,
And still I questioned or replied,
While my heart, convulsed to really speak,
Lay choking in its pride.
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco’s loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
And wonder at the moss.
We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder’s date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,
Take the path again—but wait!
Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o’er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How grey at once is the evening grown—
One star, its chrysolite!
We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
And life be a proof of this!...
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen....
How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment’s product thus,
When a soul declares itself—to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!...
I am named and known by that moment’s feat;
There took my station and degree;
So grew my own small life complete,
As nature obtained her best of me—
One born to love you, sweet!
And to watch you sink by the fire-side now
Back again, as you mutely sit
Musing by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how!
R. BROWNING (_By the Fireside_).
The last verse, describing Mrs. Browning, makes it clear that
the poet is speaking of his own love-story, although the scene
is imaginary. The last two verses are to be read literally, as
an expression of the poet’s firm belief, and not as poetical
exaggeration.
* * * * *
You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature.
You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows.
Wise men are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature,
except what is contrary to mathematical truth, as that two and two cannot
make five. There are dozens and hundreds of things in the world which
we should certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we did not
see them going on under our eyes all day long. If people had never seen
little seeds grow into great plants and trees, of quite different shapes
from themselves, and these trees again produce fresh seeds, they would
have said, “The thing cannot be”.... Suppose that no human being had
ever seen or heard of an elephant. And suppose that you described him to
people, and said, “This is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the beast
... and this is the section of his skull, more like a mushroom than a
reasonable skull of a reasonable or unreasonable beast; yet he is the
wisest of all beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast
accounts.” People would surely have said, “Nonsense; your elephant is
contrary to nature,” and have thought you were telling stories—as the
French thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that
he had shot a giraffe; and as the King of the Cannibal Islands thought
of the English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to
marble, and rain fell as feathers. The truth is that folks’ fancy that
such and such things cannot be, simply because they have not seen them,
is worth no more than a savage’s fancy that there cannot be such a thing
as a locomotive, because he never saw one running wild in the forest.
CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875) (_Water-Babies_).
This passage interested us greatly in the old days, and also
another passage drawing a not very satisfactory analogy between
the transformation of insects and our probable transformation
at death. I do not know whether the elephant’s brain warrants
Kingsley’s deduction.
This book, published in 1863,[16] had a considerable effect
in doing away with the barbarous employment of young children
in mines, factories, brickfields, etc. It called attention
particularly to the chimney-sweep boys of four or five years
of age who had to climb up the narrow chimneys, and who were
simply slaves, neglected and ill-treated by their drunken
masters. We are apt to forget how recently we emerged from
barbarism in many directions, and that we are only now becoming
civilized in other respects, as, for instance, with regard to
the poor, suffering, and ignorant.
* * * * *
The worst way to improve the world
Is to condemn it.
P. J. BAILEY (_Festus_).
* * * * *
THE DARK GLASS
Not I myself know all my love for thee:
How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh
To-morrow’s dower by gage of yesterday?
Shall birth and death, and all dark names that be
As doors and windows bared to some loud sea,
Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray;
And shall my sense pierce love,—the last relay
And ultimate outpost of eternity?
Lo! what am I to Love, the lord of all?
One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,—
One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand.
Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest call
And veriest touch of powers primordial
That any hour-girt life may understand.
D. G. ROSSETTI.
* * * * *
The gods are on the side of the strongest.
TACITUS (_Hist._ 4, 17).
De Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, said in 1677, “God is on the side
of the heaviest battalions.” Voltaire again said, in 1770, that
there are far more fools than wise men, “and they say that God
always favours the heaviest battalions” (Letter to Le Riche).
Gibbon wrote, “The winds and waves are always on the side of
the ablest navigators” (Ch. LXVIII). (I owe part of this note
to _King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations_.)
* * * * *
THE OCTOPUS
BY ALGERNON _SINBURN_
Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed,
Whence camest to dazzle our eyes,
With thy bosom bespangled and banded,
With the hues of the seas and the skies?
Is thy name European or Asian,
Oh mystical monster marine,
Part molluscous and partly crustacean,
Betwixt and between?
Wast thou born to the sound of sea-trumpets?
Hast thou eaten and drunk to excess
Of the sponges—thy muffins and crumpets—
Of the sea-weed—thy mustard and cress?
Wast thou nurtured in caverns of coral,
Remote from reproof or restraint?
Art thou innocent, art thou immoral,
Sinburnian or Saint?
Lithe limbs curling free as a creeper,
That creeps in a desolate place,
To enrol and envelop the sleeper
In a silent and stealthy embrace;
Cruel beak craning forward to bite us,
Our juices to drain and to drink,
Or to whelm as in waves of Cocytus,
Indelible ink!
Oh, breast that ’twere rapture to writhe on!
Oh, arms ’twere delicious to feel
Clinging close with the crush of the Python,
When she maketh her murderous meal!
In thy eight-fold embraces enfolden
Let our empty existence escape;
Give us death that is glorious and golden,
Crushed all out of shape!
Ah, thy red limbs lascivious and luscious,
With death in their amorous kiss!
Cling round us and clasp us and crush us,
With bitings of agonized bliss!
We are sick with the poison of pleasure,
Dispense us the potion of pain;
Ope thy mouth to its uttermost measure,
And bite us again!
A. C. HILTON (1851-1877)
This extraordinarily clever parody of Swinburne’s “Dolores” was
written by Arthur Clement Hilton, when he was an undergraduate
at St. John’s, Cambridge. It appeared in _The Light Green_, a
clever but short-lived magazine published in Cambridge in the
early seventies as a rival to _The Dark Blue_, published in
London by Oxford men. Hilton was the main contributor to _The
Light Green_. He died when only twenty-six years of age. This
brilliant young author is not included in _The Dictionary of
National Biography_.
“The Octopus” is one of the best of English parodies. I had
not seen it for forty years, until I recently found it in Adam
and White’s _Parodies and Imitations_ (1912). In that book,
although the authors presumably had _The Light Green_ to print
from, the punctuation is inferior to that in my copy, and the
word “Dispose” instead of “Dispense” in the third last line
must be a misprint.
* * * * *
He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds,
but who know what they know very well—shallow streams, and clear because
they are shallow.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Table Talk_).
* * * * *
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world
tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
R. L. STEVENSON (_Virginibus Puerisque_).
* * * * *
Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.
(To know all is forgive all.)
FRENCH PROVERB.
This proverb is said to have originated from a sentence in Mme.
de Staël’s _Corinne, Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent_,
“Understanding everything makes one very forgiving.”
* * * * *
The true life of the human community is planted deep in the private
affections of its members; in the greatness of its individual minds;
in the pure severities of its domestic conscience; in the noble and
transforming thoughts that fertilize its sacred nooks. Who can observe,
without astonishment, the durable action of men truly great on the
history of the world, and the evanescence of vast military revolutions,
once threatening all things with destruction? How often is it the fate
of the former to be invisible for an age, and then live for ever; of the
latter, to sweep a generation from the earth, and then vanish with slight
trace?
JAMES MARTINEAU (_The Outer and the Inner Temple_).
Wars seem to leave little trace except where they result in the
immigration and settlement of a tribe or nation. Otherwise they
appear to cancel one another. The present war will probably
destroy the only trace of the Franco-Prussian war, and, with
respect to Turkey, Poland, and other countries, will no doubt
cancel the effects of many tremendous conflicts of past
centuries.
* * * * *
A century ago men were following, with bated breath, the march of
Napoleon, and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest news of
the wars. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being
born. But who could think about _babies_? Everybody was thinking about
_battles_. In one year, lying midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo,
there stole into the world a host of heroes! During that one year, 1809,
Mr. Gladstone was born in Liverpool; Alfred Tennyson was born at the
Somersby rectory and Oliver Wendell Holmes made his first appearance in
Massachusetts. On the very self-same day of that self-same year Charles
Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first
breath in old Kentucky. Music was enriched by the advent of Frederic
Chopin at Warsaw, and of Felix Mendelssohn at Hamburg. Within the same
year, too, Samuel Morley was born in Homerton, Edward Fitzgerald in
Woodbridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Durham, and Frances Kemble in
London. But nobody thought of babies. Everybody was thinking of battles.
Yet, viewing that age in the truer perspective which the distance of a
hundred years enables us to command, we may well ask ourselves, “Which of
the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809?” ...
We fancy that God can only manage His world by big battalions abroad,
when all the while He is doing it by beautiful babies at home. When a
wrong wants righting, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants
opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. That is why, long,
long ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem.
FRANK W. BOREHAM (_Mountains in the Mist_).
* * * * *
REINFORCEMENTS
When little boys with merry noise
In the meadows shout and run;
And little girls, sweet woman buds,
Brightly open in the sun;
I may not of the world despair,
Our God despaireth not, I see;
For blithesomer in Eden’s air
These lads and maidens could not be.
Why were they born, if Hope must die?
Wherefore this health, if Truth should fail?
And why such Joy, if Misery
Be conquering us and must prevail?
Arouse! our spirit may not droop!
These young ones fresh from Heaven are;
Our God hath sent another troop,
And means to carry on the war.
THOMAS TOKE LYNCH (1818-1871).
* * * * *
O wind, a word with you before you pass;
What did you to the Rose that on the grass
Broken she lies and pale, who loved you so?
* * * * *
THE WIND
Roses must live and love, and winds must blow.
PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON (_The Rose and the Wind_).
* * * * *
WHAT OF THE DARKNESS?
What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?
Are there great calms, and find ye silence there?
Like soft-shut lilies all your faces glow
With some strange peace our faces never know,
With some great faith our faces never dare:
Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?
Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?
Is it a Hand to still the pulse’s leap?
Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?
Day shows us not such comfort anywhere:
Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
Out of the Day’s deceiving light we call,
Day, that shows man so great and God so small.
That hides the stars and magnifies the grass;
O is the Darkness too a lying glass
Or, undistracted, do ye find truth there?
What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?
R. LE GALLIENNE.
These lines were written of _the blind_, but become even more
beautiful and true if applied to a different subject, _the
dead_.
* * * * *
Continuing the work of creation, _i.e._, co-operating as instruments of
Providence in bringing order out of disorder ... is only a part of the
mission of mankind, and the time will come again when its due rank will
be assigned to contemplation and the calm culture of reverence and love.
Then poetry will resume her equality with prose.... But that time is not
yet, and the crowning glory of Wordsworth is that he has borne witness
to it and kept alive its traditions in an age, which, but for him, would
have lost sight of it entirely.
J. S. MILL.
In that utilitarian period the figure of the great poet stands
out in sheer sublimity. Apart from the depressing atmosphere
of the time, one needs to remember how serenely he continued
to deliver his high message in spite of the most deadly want
of appreciation. At thirty he received £10 from his poems and
nothing more until he was sixty-five! The quotation is from a
letter in Caroline Fox’s _Journals_.
* * * * *
My sarcastic friend says, with the utmost gravity, that no man with less
than a thousand pounds a year can afford to have private opinions upon
certain important subjects. He admits that he has known it done upon
eight hundred a year; but only by very prudent people with small families.
SIR A. HELPS (_Companions of my Solitude_).
* * * * *
’Tis an old theme, this Divine Love, and it cannot be exhausted. Men have
not outlived it, angels cannot outlearn it. It swayed the ancient world
by many a fair god and goddess; its light has been cast over ages of
Christian controversy and warfare; it is still the guiding Star of the
Sea to each voyager after the nobler faith. The youth leaves the old
shore of belief, only because love has left it. His starved affections
will no longer accept stone, though pulverized flour-like and artfully
kneaded, for bread. Their white sails fill the purple and the sombre
seas, and they hail each other to ask for the summer-land, where faith
climbs to beauty, and the lost bowers of childhood’s trust may be found
again.
MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY (1832-1907).
This fine writer was a Unitarian minister, but afterwards
became a “Free-thinker.”
* * * * *
There are in this loud stunning tide
Of human care and crime,
With whom the melodies abide
Of th’ everlasting chime;
Who carry music in their heart
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart.
Plying their daily task with busier feet,
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.
JOHN KEBLE (_The Christian Year_, “_St.
Matthew._”)
* * * * *
THE DARK COMPANION
There is an orb that mocked the lore of sages
Long time with mystery of strange unrest;
The steadfast law that rounds the starry ages
Gave doubtful token of supreme behest;
But they who knew the ways of God unchanging,
Concluded some far influence unseen—
Some kindred sphere through viewless others ranging,
Whose strong persuasions spanned the void between;
And knowing it alone through perturbation
And vague disquiet of another star,
They named it, till the day of revelation,
“The Dark Companion”—darkly guessed afar.
But when, through new perfection of appliance,
Faith merged at length in undisputed sight,
The mystic mover was revealed to science,
No Dark Companion, but—a speck of light:
No Dark Companion, but a sun of glory:
No fell disturber, but a bright compeer:
The shining complement that crowned the story:
The golden link that made the meaning clear.
Oh, Dark Companion, journeying ever by us,
Oh, grim Perturber of our works and ways,
Oh, potent Dread, unseen, yet ever nigh us,
Disquieting all the tenor of our days—
Oh, Dark Companion, Death, whose wide embraces
Overtake remotest change of clime and skies—
Oh, Dark Companion, Death, whose grievous traces
Are scattered shreds of riven enterprise—
Thou, too, in this wise, when, our eyes unsealing,
The clearer day shall change our faith to sight,
Shalt show thyself, in that supreme revealing,
No Dark Companion, but a thing of light:
No ruthless wrecker of harmonious order:
No alien heart of discord and caprice:
A beckoning light upon the Blissful Border:
A kindred element of law and peace.
So, too, our strange unrest in this our dwelling,
The trembling that thou joinest with our mirth,
Are by thy magnet-communing compelling
Our spirits farther from the scope of earth.
So, doubtless, when beneath thy potence swerving,
’Tis that thou lead’st us by a path unknown,
Our seeming deviations all subserving
The perfect orbit round the central throne.
...
The night wind moans. The Austral wilds are round me.
The loved who live—ah, God! how few they are!
I looked above; and Heaven in mercy found me
This parable of comfort in a star.
J. BRUNTON STEPHENS (_Convict Once and other
Poems_).
The “Dark Companion” is no doubt the star known as the
“Companion of Sirius.” Certain peculiarities in the motion of
Sirius led Bessel in 1844 to the belief that it had an obscure
companion, with which it was in revolution. The position of
the companion having been ascertained by calculation, it was
at last found in 1862. It is equal in mass to our sun but is
obscured by the brilliancy of Sirius, which is the brightest
of the fixed stars. Brunton Stephens’ poem was published in
Melbourne in 1873.
* * * * *
SEQUEL TO “MY QUEEN”
“_When and where shall I earliest meet her_,” etc.
Yes, but the years run circling fleeter,
Ever they pass me—I watch, I wait—
Ever I dream, and awake to meet her;
She cometh never, or comes too late.
Should I press on? for the day grows shorter—
Ought I to linger? the far end nears;
Ever ahead have I looked, and sought her
On the bright sky-line of the gathering years.
Now that the shadows are eastward sloping,
As I screen mine eyes from the slanting sun,
Cometh a thought—It is past all hoping,
Look not ahead, she is missed and gone.
Here on the ridge of my upward travel,
Ere the life-line dips to the darkening vales,
Sadly I turn, and would fain unravel
The entangled maze of a search that fails.
When and where have I seen and passed her?
What are the words I forgot to say?
Should we have met had a boat rowed faster?
Should we have loved, had I stayed that day?
Was it her face that I saw, and started,
Gliding away in a train that crossed?
Was it her form that I once, faint-hearted,
Followed awhile in a crowd and lost?
Was it there she lived, when the train went sweeping
Under the moon through the landscape hushed?
Somebody called me, I woke from sleeping,
Saw but a hamlet—and on we rushed.
Listen and linger—She yet may find me
In the last faint flush of the waning light—
Never a step on the path behind me;
I must journey alone, to the lonely night.
But is there somewhere on earth, I wonder,
A fading figure, with eyes that wait,
Who says, as she stands in the distance yonder,
“He cometh never, or comes too late?”
SIR ALFRED LYALL.
* * * * *
Too late for love, too late for joy,
Too late, too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate;
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died, behind the grate;
Her heart was starving all this while
You made it wait.
Ten years ago, five years ago,
One year ago,
Even then you had arrived in time,
Though somewhat slow;
Then you had known her living face
Which now you cannot know:
The frozen fountain would have leaped,
The buds gone on to blow,
The warm south wind would have awaked
To melt the snow.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (_The Prince’s Progress_).
* * * * *
Where waitest thou,
Lady I am to love? Thou comest not!
Thou knowest of my sad and lonely lot;
I looked for thee ere now!...
Where art thou, sweet?
I long for thee, as thirsty lips for streams!
Oh, gentle promised Angel of my dreams,
Why do we never meet?
Thou art as I,—
Thy soul doth wait for mine, as mine for thee;
We cannot live apart; must meeting be
Never before we die ...?
SIR EDWIN ARNOLD (_À Ma Future_).
* * * * *
Mild is the parting year, and sweet
The odour of the falling spray;
Life passes on more rudely fleet,
And balmless is its closing day.
I wait its close, I court its gloom,
But mourn that never must there fall
Or on my breast or on my tomb
The tear that would have sooth’d it all.
W. S. LANDOR.
* * * * *
The devil has made the stuff of our life and God makes the hem.
VICTOR HUGO (_By the King’s Command_).
* * * * *
I think, I said, I can make it plain that there are at least six
personalities distinctly to be recognized as taking part in a dialogue
between John and Thomas.