Whate’er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine....
Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
What may Thy service be?—
Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word,
But simply following Thee.
We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee,
The Light, the Truth, the Way!
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (_Our Master_).
Many verses are omitted from this poem for want of space, and
the last two are transposed in order.
* * * * *
’Tis weary watching wave by wave,
And yet the Tide heaves onward,
We climb, like Corals, grave by grave,
That pave a pathway sunward;
We are driven back, for our next fray
A newer strength to borrow,
And, where the Vanguard camps To-day,
The Rear shall rest To-morrow.
GERALD MASSEY (_To-day and To-morrow_).
* * * * *
Where gods are not, spectres rule.
* * * * *
Where children are is a golden age.
* * * * *
A people, like a child, is a separate educational problem.
NOVALIS.
* * * * *
Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, _not_ a
false imagining, an unreal character—but, looking through all the rubbish
of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature—loves,
not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem
inspired by a divine gift of prophecy—like the mother of St. Augustine,
who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him
in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the
right hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious
foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we
daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them
with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and
weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (_The Minister’s Wooing_).
* * * * *
Because thou hast the power and own’st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains) and behold my soul’s true face,
The dim and weary witness of life’s race,—
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul’s distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for a place
In the new Heavens,—because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God’s infliction, nor death’s neighbourhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,—
Nothing repels thee, ... Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
E. B. BROWNING (_Sonnets from the Portuguese_).
Here two fine thoughts of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Browning are
inspired by the vision of Monica, the saintly mother of the
great St. Augustine (354-430).
This is a good illustration of the need of notes. Without a
reference to St. Monica’s vision, I think that readers would be
repelled, rather than attracted, by Mrs. Browning’s sonnet. It
does not accord with one’s sense of modesty that a lady should
say to her lover, “My unattractive person and incurable illness
turned other men away, but you saw that, behind all this, I was
‘a patient _angel_ waiting for a place in the new Heavens.’” I
myself could not understand how Mrs. Browning could write and
her husband could publish this poem, until Hodgson, in one of
his letters to me, referred to “the use made by Mrs. Browning
of St. Monica’s vision in one of her sonnets.”
The sonnet is not quoted as one of the finest of the series.
I have placed Mrs. Stowe’s quotation first for an obvious
reason; but _The Minister’s Wooing_ was published in 1859,
while the sonnet appeared in 1847.
* * * * *
Death is the ocean of immortal rest; ...
Where shines ’mid laughing waves a far-off isle for me
Why fear? The light wind whitens all the brine,
And throws fresh foam upon the marble shores;
Or it may be that strong and strenuous oars
Must force the shallop o’er the hyaline;
But, welcome utter calm or bitter blast,—
The voyage will be done, the island reached at last.
...
Will it be thus when the strange sleep of Death
Lifts from the brow, and lost eyes live again?
Will morning dawn on the bewildered brain,
To cool and heal? And shall I feel the breath
Of freshening winds that travel from the sea,
And meet thy loving, laughing eyes, Earine?
...
O virgin world! O marvellous far days!
No more with dreams of grief doth love grow bitter
Nor trouble dim the lustre wont to glitter
In happy eyes. Decay alone decays;
A moment—death’s dull sleep is o’er and we
Drink the immortal morning air, Earine.
MORTIMER COLLINS.
* * * * *
We live in a world, where one fool makes many fools, but one wise man
only a few wise men.
LICHTENBERG.
* * * * *
O Lady! We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Dejection_).
See note to next quotation.
* * * * *
TELLING STORIES.
A little child He took for sign
To them that sought the way Divine.
And once a flower sufficed to show
The whole of that we need to know.
Now here we lie, the child and I,
And watch the clouds go floating by,
Just telling stories turn by turn....
Lord, which is teacher, which doth learn?
H. D. LOWRY.
As Coleridge says in the last quotation, “We receive but what
we give.” We bring with us the mind that sees, and the feelings
and emotions with which we contemplate the universe; and, so
far as use, habit, and other causes still the activity and
lessen the receptivity of the mind and spirit, the world around
us becomes less instinct with life and beauty.
Putting aside the question whether, as Wordsworth says in his
great Ode,
Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home,
it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic,
appreciative sense that the _child’s_ outlook on the world
around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more
intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and
wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and
less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties
in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh
and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents
more _truthful_ appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is
blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening
and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the
development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense
of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child,
his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot
_feel_ the difference between the child’s outlook and his own,
this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It
is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never
loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such
an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience,
there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and
hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little
children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art
produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give
us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional
sensibility of a child.
In Edward Fitzgerald’s _Euphranor_, at the point where
Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is
interesting:—
“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of
no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes;
and how it was from those of his own he learned that those
of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not
overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they
might be.”
“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his
having watched his child one morning _worshipping the sunbeam
on the bedpost_—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but
the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a
while!”
(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the
baby in question, Vol. I., 357).
* * * * *
THE REVELATION
An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a life-time each;
They lift their heavy heads and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget: but, either way,
That, and the Child’s unheeded dream,
Is all the light of all their day.
COVENTRY PATMORE (1823-1896).
* * * * *
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which
insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are
all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded
on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely
spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive
there yourself![21] To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic
times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum
specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that
did not daily, through long years of the foretime, hold fast to the
body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror
just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill
the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens
the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird
fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at
this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence
fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever
they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror
which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on
the situation.
WILLIAM JAMES (_The Varieties of Religious Experience_).
* * * * *
Et in Arcadia ego.
(I too have been in Arcady.)
ANON.
Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken
to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as
in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and other literature. It was
famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.
The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre
by N. Poussin (1594-1665). In part of the landscape is a tomb
on which these words are written, and some young people are
seen reading them. I learn, however, from _King’s Classical and
Foreign Quotations_ that the words had been previously written
on a picture by Bart. Schidone (1570-1615), where two young
shepherds are looking at a skull.
The meaning intended was that _death_ came even to the joyous
shepherds of Arcady. But the quotation is now used in a more
general sense. “I too had my golden days of youth and love and
happiness.”
* * * * *
It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have
been most injured by slanderers; as we usually find that to be the
sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.
ALEXANDER POPE.
* * * * *
There are many flowers of heavenly origin in this world; they do
not flourish in this climate but are properly heralds, clear-voiced
messengers of a better existence: Religion is one; Love is another.
NOVALIS.
* * * * *
ON DYING
I always made an awkward bow.
KEATS.
* * * * *
On n’a pas d’antécédent pour cela. Il faut improviser—c’est donc si
difficile. (Death admits of no rehearsal.)
AMIEL.
* * * * *
C’est le maître jour; c’est le jour juge de tous les autres. (It is the
master-day; the day that judges all the others.)
MONTAIGNE.
* * * * *
Will she return, my lady? Nay:
Love’s feet, that once have learned to stray,
Turn never to the olden way.
Ah, heart of mine, where lingers she?
By what live stream or saddened sea?
What wild-flowered swath of sungilt lea
Do her feet press, and are her days
Sweet with new stress of love and praise,
Or sad with echoes of old lays?
JOHN PAYNE (_Light o’ Love_).
* * * * *
I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life.
...
I say, I cannot think that gains—which will not be
Except a special soul had gained them—that such gain
Can ever be estranged, do aught but appertain
Immortally, by right firm, indefeasible,
To who performed the feat, through God’s grace and man’s will.
R. BROWNING (_Fifine at the Fair_).
* * * * *
Nature, they say, doth dote
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan
Repeating us by rote.
J. R. LOWELL (_Ode at Harvard Commemoration_).
* * * * *
Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I
always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower
would grow.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
* * * * *
Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep?
Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition?
It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant
might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary,
as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling
at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or
protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It
would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent
immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained.
Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you
talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital,
and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”
A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us
that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking
state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation
from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but
one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired
or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.
F. W. H. MYERS (_Multiplex Personality_).
This is from an article in _The Nineteenth Century_ for
November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the
trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism.
In his _Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death_
his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows:
In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated
state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our
prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the
waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously.
We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller
vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original
undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed
by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly
life then become intensified, but by natural selection other
faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with
the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness.
The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere _absence of
waking faculties_. In this state we have some faint glimmer of
the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams,
somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the
relations of hysteria and _genius_ to ordinary life correspond
to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and
he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism
generally.
Thus in sleep there are, _first_, certain physiological changes
(including a greater control of the physical organism, as
seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of
time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give
the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will
give. But also, _secondly_, we find existing in sleep the other
faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus
during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly
solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense
sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again
Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect
us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying
the phenomena of sleep and investigating it _experimentally_ by
employing hypnotism.
William James adopted much the same view as Myers (see, for
example, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_). But much
has been written of late about sub-consciousness and about
dreams; and the tendency is rather to follow Martineau’s view
of mental development—that the lower nervous centres are
unconscious “habits” deposited from the old intelligence (see
p. 304). Thus, for instance, memories of the past would be
recorded in the sub-conscious, but there is nothing to be found
there _of a higher character_ than in the conscious self. In
sleep, the waking control being removed, our dreams reveal
impulses and desires that have been inhibited or kept under
in waking life, but do not reveal anything of the _higher_
indicated by Myers. However, although it is too large a subject
to discuss here, there is a vast deal yet to be explained,
as, for example, inspiration, and what we used to call
“unconscious cerebration,” and the amazing results of hypnotism
and suggestion. Also who or what is it that _composes_ the
dream-story, or who or what _makes us_ act or dream the story?
* * * * *
Without good nature man is but a better kind of vermin.
* * * * *
Extreme self-lovers will set a man’s house on fire, though it were but to
roast their eggs.
BACON.
* * * * *
Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace,
Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.
On stormy nights when wild north-westers rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
Exults to hear, and scorns to wish it past.
Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
A. H. CLOUGH (_Songs in Absence_)
The Ship is the ship of life. The first line is taken from
Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Where lies the land to which yon Ship
must go.”
* * * * *
The brooding East with awe beheld
Her impious younger world.
The Roman tempest swell’d and swell’d,
And on her head was hurled.
The East bowed low before the blast
In patient, deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
M. ARNOLD (_Obermann Once More_)
* * * * *
Learn to win a lady’s faith
Nobly as the thing is high,
Bravely as for life and death,
With a loyal gravity.
E. B. BROWNING (_The Lady’s Yes_).
* * * * *
THE CORAL REEF
In my dreams I dreamt
Of a coral reef—
Far away, far, far away,
Where seas were lulled and calm,
A place of silver sand.
Truly a lovely land,
Truly a lovely dream,
Truly a peaceful scene—
When, like a flash, through all the sea
There shone a gleam.
Rising like Venus from her wat’ry bed
Rose a young mermaid with her hair unkempt,
Beautiful hair! light as a golden leaf,
Shining like Phoebus at the break of day.
And she tossed and shook her lovely head,
Shook off drops more precious, far, than pearls.
To a coral rock she slowly went,
Slowly floated like a graceful swan;
Combed her hair that hung in yellow curls
Till the evening shadows ’gan to fall;
Then she gave one look round, that was all,
Rose—and then, her figure curved, arms bent
Above her head—a flash! and she was gone;
And ripples in wide circles rise and fall,
Spreading and spreading still, where she has been.
BETTY BRAY, January 1918. Aged 11.
See Note on page 155.
* * * * *
BENEATH MY WINDOW
Beneath my window, roses red and white
Nod like a host of flitting butterflies;
But, faded by the day, one ev’ry night
Shakes its soft petals to the ground, and dies.
And that is why I see, when night doth pass,
Tears in her sisters’ eyes, and on the grass.
BETTY BRAY, 1920. Aged 13.
* * * * *
MUSIC
Three wondrous things there are upon the earth,
Three gentle spirits, that I love full well,
Three glorious voices, which by far excel
Even the silver-throated Philomel.
For not in sound alone lies music’s worth,
But rather in the feeling that it brings,
Whether of joy, or peace, or dreaminess.
And when I hear the rain soft, softly beat,
Singing with low, sweet voice, and musical,
I think of all the tears that ever fell
In perfect happiness, or deep distress,
And so it brings a pang, half sad, half sweet,
Into my heart.
Then, when the sparkling rill
Dances between the sunny banks, and sings
For very joy, all dimpling with delight,
O all the happy laughter ’neath the sky
Rings sweet and clear, and makes the world more bright.
And, when the sun has sunk beneath the sea
And vanished from the glory of the west,
Leaving the peaceful eve to melt to night,—
O then it is the loveliest voice of all,
The gentle night-wind softly sings to me,
Tender and low, as sweetest lullaby
As ever hushed a weary head to rest:
On, on it sings, until from drowsiness
My tired eyes softly close, and all is still.
BETTY BRAY, 1920 Aged 13.
See Note on page 155.
* * * * *
THE MARTYR
When night fell softly on the silent city,
A little white moth thro’ my window came
Out of the darkness and the shadows dim,
Seeking the brightness of my candle’s flame.
Around and round the lighted wick he flew,
Winging his wonderful and curious flight;
And near, and still more near, the circles grew....
And then—the flame no more was bright for him.
Then all my heart went out in sudden pity
To that small martyr, who had sought for light,
And found—his death. O he was fair to die.
I rose and snuffed the candle with a sigh.
BETTY BRAY, September 26, 1920. Aged 14 years.
These fresh, clear, spontaneous verses have a special value.
They bring us a promise of Spring—the message that we may still
hope for a revival of English Poetry.
Therefore, I have included them (in this third edition)
although they are outside the general scope of my book.
Miss Betty Bray has been writing since she was seven years of
age. She writes with great facility and has already filled two
manuscript books. Her verses are entirely her own, no defects
being pointed out or other assistance or guidance given her.
She was born on June 11th, 1906. She is the daughter of Mr.
Denys de Saumarez Bray, C.S.I., and the grand-niece of my late
partner the Hon. Sir John Bray, K.C.M.G., who was Premier of
South Australia. Her grandfather was born in Adelaide.
* * * * *
Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
MILTON (_Paradise Lost_).
Milton refers to his blindness in this and other passages—as in
the well known sonnet.
* * * * *
THE ATTAINMENT
You love? That’s high as you shall go;
For ’tis as true as Gospel text,
Not noble then is never so,
Either in this world or the next.
COVENTRY PATMORE (_The Angel in the House_).
* * * * *
For one fair Vision ever fled
Down the waste waters day and night,
And still we follow where she led,
In hope to gain upon her flight.
Her face was evermore unseen,
And fixt upon the far sea-line;
But each man murmured, “O my Queen,
I follow till I make thee mine!”
And now we lost her, now she gleamed
Like Fancy made of golden air.
Now nearer to the prow she seemed
Like Virtue firm, like Knowledge fair,
Now high on waves that idly burst
Like Heavenly Hope she crowned the sea,
And now, the bloodless point reversed,
She bore the blade of Liberty.
TENNYSON (_The Voyage_).
* * * * *