His breeches cost him but a crowne;
He held them sixpence all too deare
Therefore he called the taylor lowne, rascal
He was a wight of high renowne
And thouse but of a low degree, thou art
It’s pride that putts the countrye downe,
Man, take thine old cloake about thee.
PERCY’S _Reliques_.
The poor man wants a new cloak, but his wife objects.
The verse is sung by Iago (_Othello_, Act II., Sc. 3), the
words being a little different.
* * * * *
LOVE’S LAST MESSAGES
Merry, merry little stream,
Tell me, hast thou seen my dear?
I left him with an azure dream,
Calmly sleeping on his bier—
But he has fled!
“I passed him in his churchyard bed—
A yew is sighing o’er his head,
And grass-roots mingle with his hair.”
What doth he there?
O cruel, can he lie alone?
Or in the arms of one more dear?
Or hides he in that bower of stone,
To cause, and kiss away my fear?
“He doth not speak, he doth not moan—
Blind, motionless, he lies alone;
But, ere the grave-snake fleshed his sting,
This one warm tear he bade me bring
And lay it at thy feet
Among the daisies sweet.”
Moonlight whisperer, summer air,
Songster of the groves above,
Tell the maiden rose I wear
Whether thou hast seen my love.
“This night in heaven I saw him lie,
Discontented with his bliss;
And on my lips he left this kiss,
For thee to taste and then to die.”
T. L. BEDDOES (1803-1849).
Beddoes intended to destroy this poem, but it was published
without his knowledge. This is one of the cases where artists
have shown themselves incapable critics of their own work.
* * * * *
O Earth so full of dreary noises!
O men with wailing in your voices!
O delvèd gold, the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse that o’er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all
And giveth His beloved sleep.
E. B. BROWNING (_The Sleep_).
* * * * *
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit, and the Muse,—
Nothing refuse
...
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go
The gods arrive.
R. W. EMERSON (_Give all to Love_).
* * * * *
On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left no more trace than
have last winter’s snowflakes. This commonplace sequence and flowing
on of life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when Charles
lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the
icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the
snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when,
at three o’clock, the red sun set in the purple mist.... Battles have
been fought, kings have died, history has transacted itself; but, all
unheeding and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apples-trees redden,
and wheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, and
rejoiced over its newborn children, and with proper solemnity carried its
dead to the churchyard.
ALEXANDER SMITH (_Dreamthorp_).
* * * * *
O moon, tell me,
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
SIR P. SIDNEY.
“Do they call ungratefulness a virtue?”
* * * * *
Quixotism, or Utopianism: that is another of the devil’s pet words. I
believe the quiet admission which we are all of us so ready to make,
that, because things have long been wrong, it is impossible they should
ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from
which this world suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from
attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware
of that man. Cast the word out of your dictionary altogether.
JOHN RUSKIN (_Lectures on Architecture and Painting_).
* * * * *
Two angels guide
The path of man, both aged and yet young,
As angels are, ripening through endless years.
On one he leans: some call her Memory,
And some Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
With deep mysterious accord: the other,
Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams
A light divine and searching on the earth,
Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,
Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked
But for Tradition; we walk evermore
To higher paths, by brightening Reason’s lamp.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Spanish Gypsy_).
* * * * *
Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance:
not one Christian: not one but undervalues Christianity—singly, what am I
to do? Wesley (have you read his life?) was he not an elevated character?
Wesley has said “Religion is not a solitary thing.” Alas! it necessarily
is so with me, or next to solitary.
CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) (_Letter to S. T. Coleridge, Jan. 10, 1797_).
Poor lovable Charles Lamb! When he wrote this he was only
twenty-one years of age, he had already been himself confined
in an asylum, and now his sister in a moment of madness had
killed her mother. When afterwards he was allowed to take care
of Mary, he had still to take her back to the asylum from time
to time, as a fresh attack of mania began to manifest itself.
The picture of the weeping brother and sister on their way to
the asylum is dreadfully sad. The passage seems interesting
because of Lamb’s reference to Wesley.
* * * * *
Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain:
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain:
As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.
KEATS (_The Eve of St. Agnes_).
Madeline is lying asleep in bed—but the last line could be used
in quite another sense as prettily expressing _rejuvenation_.
* * * * *
Beneath the moonlight and the snow
Lies dead my latest year;
The winter winds are wailing low
Its dirges in my ear.
I grieve not with the moaning wind
As if a loss befell;
Before me, even as behind,
God is, and all is well!
J. G. WHITTIER (_My Birthday_).
* * * * *
If on my theme I rightly think,
There are five reasons why men drink:—
Good wine; a friend; or being dry;
Or lest we should be by and by;
Or—any other reason why.
HENRY ALDRICH (1647-1710).
_Autres temps, autres moeurs!_ Aldrich was Dean of Christ
Church, Oxford, when he wrote these lines.
* * * * *
INSCRIPTION FOR A BUST OF CUPID
Qui que tu sois, voici ton maître;
Il l’est, le fut, ou le doit être.
(Whatso’er thou art, thy master see!
He was, or is, or is to be.)
VOLTAIRE.
* * * * *
UP-HILL
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum[22]
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
* * * * *
A pebble in the streamlet scant
Has turned the course of many a river,
A dewdrop in the baby plant
Has warped the giant oak for ever.
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
* * * * *
But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes’ his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
“They are gone.”
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
My grandmamma has said—
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago,—
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow.
But now his nose is thin.
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff.
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh....
O. W. HOLMES (_The Last Leaf_).
* * * * *
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!
JOHN KEATS (_Ode on a Grecian Urn_).
Matthew Arnold says of this: “No, it is not all; but it is
true, deeply true, and we have deep need to know it.... To see
things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and
Keats knew it. ‘What the Imagination seizes on as Beauty must
be Truth,’ he says in prose.”
* * * * *
Were it not sadder, in the years to come,
To feel the hand-clasp slacken for long use,
The untuned heart-strings for long stress refuse
To yield old harmonies, the songs grow dumb
For weariness, and all the old spells lose
The first enchantment? Yet this they must be:
Love is but mortal, save in memory.
JOHN PAYNE (_A Farewell_).
* * * * *
Aux coeurs blessés—l’ombre et le silence.
(For the wounded heart—shade and silence.)
BALZAC (_Le Médecin de Campagne_).
* * * * *
The huge mass of black crags that towered at the head of the gloomy
defile was exactly what one would picture as the enchanted castle of the
evil magician, within sight of which all vegetation withered, looking
from over the desolate valley of ruins to the barren shore strewed with
its sad wreckage, and the wild ocean beyond....
The land-crabs certainly looked their part of goblin guardians of the
approaches to the wicked magician’s fastness. They were fearful as the
firelight fell on their yellow cynical faces, fixed as that of the
sphinx, but fixed in a horrid grin. Those who have observed this foulest
species of crab will know my meaning. Smelling the fish we were cooking
they came down the mountains in thousands upon us. We threw them lumps of
fish, which they devoured with crab-like slowness, yet perseverance.
It is a ghastly sight, a land-crab at his dinner. A huge beast was
standing a yard from me; I gave him a portion of fish, and watched him.
He looked at me straight in the face with his outstarting eyes, and
proceeded with his two front claws to tear up his food, bringing bits
of it to his mouth with one claw, as with a fork. But all this while he
never looked at what he was doing; his face was fixed in one position,
staring at me. And when I looked around, lo! there were half a dozen
others all steadily feeding, but with immovable heads turned to me with
that fixed basilisk stare. It was indeed horrible, and the effect was
nightmarish in the extreme. While we slept that night they attacked us,
and would certainly have devoured us, had we not awoke; and did eat holes
in our clothes. One of us had to keep watch, so as to drive them from the
other two, otherwise we should have had no sleep.
Imagine a sailor cast alone on this coast, weary, yet unable to sleep a
moment on account of these ferocious creatures. After a few days of an
existence full of horror he would die raving mad, and then be consumed in
an hour by his foes. In all Dante’s Inferno there is no more horrible a
suggestion of punishment than this.
E. F. KNIGHT (_The Cruise of the “Falcon”_).
The scene is in the Island of Trinidad, off the coast of Brazil.
* * * * *
... Nor the end of love is sure,
(Alas! how much less sure than anything!)
Whether the little love-light shall endure
In the clear eyes of her we loved in Spring.
Or if the faint flowers of remembering
Shall blow, we know not: only this we know,—
Afar Death comes with silent steps and slow.
JOHN PAYNE (_Salvestra_).
* * * * *
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
W. WORDSWORTH (_Three Years She Grew_).
* * * * *
As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely
things are also necessary: the wild flower by the wayside, as well as the
tended corn; and the wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as
the tended cattle: because man doth not live by bread alone, but also by
the desert manna; by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God.
JOHN RUSKIN.
* * * * *
Alas! the long gray years have vanquished me,
The shadow of the inexorable days!
I am grown sad and silent: for the sea
Of Time has swallowed all my pleasant ways.
I am grown weary of the years that flee
And bring no light to set my bound hope free,
No sun to fill the promise of old Mays.
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
* * * * *
LOVE
Cet égoisme à deux.
DE STAËL.
* * * * *
It is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of
three.
WASHINGTON IRVING.
* * * * *
I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible
world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of
us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw
vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my
own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this
life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a
real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe
by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from
which one may withdraw at will. But it _feels_ like a real fight,—as if
there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our
idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all
to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild,
half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our
nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our
willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.... In these
depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions
take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the
nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul
all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example,
which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith—sound to us like
mere chatterings of the teeth.
WILLIAM JAMES (_Is Life Worth Living?_).
(Mr. T. R. Glover in _The Jesus of History_ points out that
when Christ said “Ye are they that have continued with me in my
temptations” (Luke xxii, 26), He meant that the disciples had
_helped Him_ by their fidelity.)
The following is from Professor Hobhouse’s _Questions of
War and Peace_, repeating what he had set out at length in
his _Development and Purpose_ (I take the quotation from
_The Spectator_ review, as the book is not yet procurable in
Australia):
“I think, therefore, that we must go back into ourselves for
faith, and away from ourselves into the world for reason.
The deeper we go into ourselves the more we throw off forms
and find the assurance not only that the great things exist,
but that they are the heart of our lives, and, since after
all we are of one stock, they must be at the heart of your
lives as well as mine. You say there are bad men and wars and
cruelties and wrong, I say all these are the collision of
undeveloped forms. What is the German suffering from but a
great illusion that the State is something more than man, and
that power is more than justice! Strip him of this and he is
a man like yourself, pouring out his blood for the cause that
he loves, and that you and I detest. Probe inwards, then, and
you find the same spring of life everywhere and it is good.
Look outwards, and you find, as you yourself admit the slow
movement towards a harmony which just means that these impulses
of primeval energy come, so to say, to understand one another.
Every form they take as they grow will provoke conflict,
perish, and be cast aside until the whole unites, and there
you have the secret of your successive efforts and failures
which yet leave something behind them. God is not the creator
who made the world in six days, rested on the seventh and saw
that it was good. He is growing in the actual evolution of the
world.”
* * * * *
And since (man) cannot spend and use aright
The little time here given him in trust.
But wasteth it in weary undelight
Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust.
He naturally claimeth to inherit
The everlasting Future, that his merit
May have full scope; as surely is most just.
JAMES THOMSON (_The City of Dreadful Night_).
* * * * *
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.
JOHN KEATS (_His Last Sonnet_, 1820).
* * * * *
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
Love caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing.
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
W. BLAKE (_Song_).
This poem was written before Blake was _fourteen_ years of age.
* * * * *
When the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom....
He was perfumèd like a milliner;
And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet-box. And still he smiled and talked;
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
SHAKESPEARE (_1 Henry IV._, i. 3).
* * * * *
... High-kilted perhaps, as once at Dundee I saw them,
Petticoats up to the knees, or even, it might be, above them
Matching their lily-white legs with the clothes that they trod in the
wash-tub!
...
... In a blue cotton print tucked up over striped linsey-woolsey,
Barefoot, barelegged he beheld her, with arms bare up to the elbows,
Bending with fork in her hand in a garden uprooting potatoes!
A. H. CLOUGH (_The Bothie of Tober-na Vuolich_).
* * * * *
As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;
Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.
JAMES THOMSON (_The City of Dreadful Night_).
The five quotations above are from a series of word-pictures
(see p. 85).
* * * * *
SHE COMES AS COMES THE SUMMER NIGHT
She comes as comes the summer night,
Violet, perfumed, clad with stars,
To heal the eyes hurt by the light
Flung by Day’s brandish’d scimitars.
The parted crimson of her lips
Like sunset clouds that slowly die
When twilight with cool finger-tips
Unbraids her tresses in the sky.
The melody of waterfalls
Is in the music of her tongue,
Low chanted in dim forest halls
Ere Dawn’s loud bugle-call has rung.
And as a bird with hovering wings
Halts o’er her young one in the nest,
Then droops to still his flutterings,
She takes me to her fragrant breast.
O star and bird at once thou art,
And Night, with purple-petall’d charm,
Shining and singing to my heart,
And soothing with a dewy calm.
Let Death assume this lovely guise,
So darkly beautiful and sweet,
And, gazing with those starry eyes,
Lead far away my weary feet.
And that strange sense of valleys fair
With birds and rivers making song
To lull the blossoms gleaming there,
Be with me as I pass along.
Ah! lovely sisters, Night and Death,
And lovelier Woman—wondrous three,
“Givers of Life,” my spirit saith,
Unfolders of the mystery.
Ah! only Love could teach me this,
In memoried springtime long since flown;
Red lips that trembled to my kiss,
That sighed farewell, and left me lone.
O Joy and Sorrow intertwined,—
A kiss, a sigh, and blinding tears,—
Yet ever after in the wind,
The bird-like music of the spheres!
FRANK S. WILLIAMSON.
This is from the author’s “Purple and Gold,” a book of poems
published in Melbourne (Thomas C. Lothian, publisher).
* * * * *
No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as
respectable selfishness.
G. MACDONALD (_Robert Falconer_).
* * * * *
WHEN LOVE MEETS LOVE
When love meets love, breast urged to breast,
God interposes,
An unacknowledged guest,
And leaves a little child among our roses.
O, gentle hap!
O, sacred lap!
O, brooding dove!
But when he grows
Himself to be a rose,
God takes him—Where is then our love?
O, where is all our love?
* * * * *
BETWEEN OUR FOLDING LIPS
Between our folding lips
God slips
An embryon life, and goes;
And this becomes your rose.
We love, God makes: in our sweet mirth
God spies occasion for a birth.
_Then is it His, or is it ours?_
I know not—He is fond of flowers.
T. E. BROWN.
Compare the well-known lines by George MacDonald:
Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here....
How did they all[23] just come to be you?
God thought about me, and so I grew.
The suggestion that we are the result of God’s thought appears
elsewhere in MacDonald, as in _Robert Falconer_:
If God were _thinking_ me—ah! But if He be only _dreaming_ me,
I shall go mad.
And in _The Marquis of Lossie_:
I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be
when He thought of you first.
* * * * *
Some things are of that Nature as to make
One’s fancy checkle, while his Heart doth ake.
JOHN BUNYAN.
Checkle = chuckle.
* * * * *
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
LORD BYRON (_On my Thirty-sixth Year_).
* * * * *
’Tis a very good world to live in,
To spend, and to lend, and to give in;
But to beg, or to borrow, or ask for our own
’Tis the very worst world that ever was known.
J. BROMFIELD.
Often ascribed to the Earl of Rochester. See _Notes and
Queries_ July 18, 1896.
* * * * *
Dead years have yet the fire of life
In Memory’s holy urn;
Her altars, heaped with frankincense
Of bygone summers, burn;
And, when in everlasting night
We see yon sun decline,
Deep in the soul his purple flames
Eternally will shine.
ALBERT JOSEPH EDMUNDS (b. 1857) (_The Living
Past_).
Mr. Edmunds, when this was written in 1880, was a young English
poet and spiritualist, but has since settled in Philadelphia.
He has written a number of works, the principal being _Buddhist
and Christian Gospels now First Compared from the Originals_.
In 1883 he was cataloguing a library at Sunderland, and came
across books on the Alps, etc., by a Rev. Leslie Stephen.
He wrote to the publishers to find out if they were by the
same writer as the Leslie Stephen who had written on Ethics.
Sir (then Mr.) Leslie Stephen had just been appointed Clark
Lecturer at Cambridge. He replied to Edmunds, “I am one
person,” adding that he had given up holy orders. Edmunds
replied:
To Mr. Leslie Stephen, Sir,
Confound your personality;
I did, and now must here, aver
Belief was not reality.
I hope my slip may be excused,
And doom this time decided not,
For, though the _persons_ I confused,
Your _substance_ I divided not.
Now thanks to you, my mind’s relieved
From mystified plurality,
For, in your courteous note received,
You’ve unified _duality_.
Your Alpine thoughts will elevate
Old Cantab’s flat vicinity,
And give her church another _state_
By unifying _Trinity_!
You’ve left, you say, the fold of strife,
Where desperate _charges_ never end;
Not handsome _living_, handsome _life_
Henceforth will make you _reverend_.
I’m Edmunds, Millfield, Sutherland,
Where souls in sulphur barter, sir;
But, please excuse an ending grand—
My name to rhyme’s a Tartar, sir.
* * * * *
SPIRITUALISM
Only a rising billow,
Only a deep sigh drawn
By the great sea of chaos
Before Creation’s dawn.
Only a little princess
Spelling the words of kings;
Only the Godhead’s prattle
In Sinai mutterings!
The crowd mistakes and fears it,
And Aaron has ignored,
But Moses, far above them,
Is talking with the Lord!
ALBERT JOSEPH EDMUNDS.
See note to previous quotation. This poem was written in 1883.