And taught him with most sage endeavour,
Why bubbles rise and acorns fall,
And why no toy may last for ever.
She talked of all the wondrous laws
Which Nature’s open book discloses,
And Childhood, ere she made a pause
Was fast asleep among the roses.
Sleep on, sleep on! Oh! Manhood’s dreams
Are all of earthly pain or pleasure,
Of Glory’s toils, Ambition’s schemes,
Of cherished love, or hoarded treasure:
But to the couch where Childhood lies
A more delicious trance is given,
Lit up by rays from seraph eyes,
And glimpses of remembered Heaven!
W. M. PRAED.
* * * * *
Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.
G. MACDONALD (_Phantastes_).
* * * * *
L’ENVOI
There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield
And the ricks stand grey to the sun,
Singing:—“Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover
And your English summer’s done.”
You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind
And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;
You have heard the song—how long! how long!
Pull out on the trail again!
Ha’ done with the Tents of Shem, dear lass,
We’ve seen the seasons through,
And it’s time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
Pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
It’s North you may run to the rime-ringed sun
Or South to the blind Horn’s hate;
Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,
Or West to the Golden Gate;
Where the blindest bluffs hold good, dear lass,
And the wildest tales are true,
And the men bulk big on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
And life runs large on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
The days are sick and cold, and the skies are grey and old,
And the twice-breathed airs blow damp;
And I’d sell my tired soul for the bucking beam-sea roll
Of a black Bilboa tramp;
With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass,
And a drunken Dago crew,
And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail
From Cadiz Bar on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,
Or the way of a man with a maid;
But the sweetest way to me is a ship’s upon the sea
In the heel of the North-East trade,
Can you hear the crash on her bows, dear lass,
And the drum of the racing screw,
As she ships it green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
As she lifts and ’scends on the Long Trail—the trail that is always
new.
See the shaking funnels roar, with the Peter at the fore,
And the fenders grind and heave,
And the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate,
And the fall-rope whines through the sheave;
It’s “Gang-plank up and in,” dear lass,
It’s “Hawsers warp her through!”
And it’s “All clear aft” on the old trail, our own trail, the out
trail,
We’re backing down on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new....
O the mutter overside, when the port-fog holds us tied,
And the sirens hoot their dread!
When foot by foot we creep o’er the hueless viewless deep
To the sob of the questing lead!
It’s down by the Lower Hope, dear lass,
With the Gunfleet Sands in view,
Till the Mouse swings green on the old trail, our own trail, the out
trail,
And the Gull Light lifts on the Long Trail—the trail that is always
new.
O the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light
That holds the hot sky tame,
And the steady fore-foot snores through the planet-powder’d floors
Where the scared whale flukes in flame!
Her plates are scarr’d by the sun, dear lass,
And her ropes are taut with the dew,
For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out
trail,
We’re sagging south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
Then home, get her home, when the drunken rollers comb,
And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and swing,
And the Southern Cross rides high!
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue,
They’re all old friends on the old trail, our own trail, the out
trail,
They’re God’s own guides on the Long Trail—the trail that is always
new.
Fly forward, O my heart, from the Foreland to the Start—
We’re steaming all too slow,
And it’s twenty thousand mile to our little lazy isle
Where the trumpet-orchids blow!
You have heard the call of the off-shore wind
And the voice of the deep-sea rain:
You have heard the song—how long! how long!
Pull out on the trail again!
The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And the deuce knows what we may do—
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out
trail,
We’re down, hull down on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
RUDYARD KIPLING.
A great sea-song; we are on board passing through scene after
scene and feeling the very movement of the ship and its gear.
* * * * *
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou soul that art the eternity of thought
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things—
With life and nature—purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude_, Bk. I).
* * * * *
The Quakers have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of
God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I can not
help smiling at the conceit, that, if the taste of a Quaker could have
been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation
it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a
bird been permitted to sing.
THOMAS PAINE (_The Age of Reason_).
This quotation reminds me of an interesting passage in
Professor Bateson’s Presidential Address to the British
Association at Melbourne in 1914. Although it has not a very
close connection with the quotation the reader will not object
to my giving it a place here:—
“Everyone must have a preliminary sympathy with the aims
of eugenists both abroad and at home. Their efforts at the
least are doing something to discover and spread truth as to
the physiological structure of society. The spread of such
organizations, however, almost of necessity suffers from a bias
towards the accepted and the ordinary, and if they had power it
would go hard with many ingredients of society that could be
ill-spared. I notice an ominous passage in which even Galton,
the founder of eugenics, feeling perhaps some twinge of his
Quaker ancestry, remarks that ‘as the Bohemianism in the nature
of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes, the
happier for mankind.’ It is not the eugenists who will give us
what Plato has called ‘divine releases from the common ways.’
If some fancier with the catholicity of Shakespeare would take
us in hand, well and good; but I would not trust Shakespeares,
_meeting as a committee_. Let us remember that Beethoven’s
father was an habitual drunkard and that his mother died of
consumption. From the genealogy of the patriarchs also we
learn—what may very well be the truth—that the fathers of such
as dwell in tents, and of all such as handle the harp or organ,
and the instructor of every artificer in brass or iron—the
founders, that is to say, of the arts and the sciences—came
in direct descent from Cain, and not in the posterity of the
irreproachable Seth, who is to us, as he probably was also in
the narrow circle of his own contemporaries, what naturalists
call a _nomen nudum_.”
_Nomen nudum_ is a bare name without further particulars,
but Donne, no doubt on the authority of Josephus (I. 2.3),
attributes Astronomy to Seth (“The Progresse of the Soule”):—
Wonder with mee
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those Arts whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cain’s race invented be,
And blest Seth vext us with Astronomie.
Donne (1573-1631) is “vext” with Astronomy, presumably because
at that time Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642) were
affirming the Copernican system and making other discoveries
supposed to be dangerous to religion.
* * * * *
Some prize his blindfold sight; and there be they
Who kissed his wings which brought him yesterday
And thank his wings to-day that he is flown.
D. G. ROSSETTI (_Love’s Lovers_).
* * * * *
A SONNET
Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times—good Lord! I’d rather be
Quite unacquainted with the A.B.C.
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.
JAMES KENNETH STEPHEN (1859-1893).
“Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,” is Wordsworth’s fine
sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland.
It is certainly extraordinary how the great poet at times
dropped into the most prosaic language and commonplace verse.
This, however, was only in his earlier poems and only in a
few of those poems. His theory at that time was that poetic
language should be natural, such as used by ordinary men, and
not essentially different from prose. Actually, however, at the
root of the matter was his want of any sense of humour. Only
so can we account for his beginning a poem “Spade! with which
Wilkinson hath tilled his lands,” or writing absurdly babyish
verses. The one instance on record in which he did apparently
exhibit a grotesque kind of humour was in a verse of _Peter
Bell_:—
Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm’d just as they on earth were cramm’d—
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damn’d.
But this he no doubt wrote quite seriously and without any idea
that the verse was humorous. Shelley placed this verse at the
head of his parody of _Peter Bell_, and Wordsworth omitted it
from the poem after 1819.
* * * * *
And, were I not, as a man may say, cautious
How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous,
I could favour you with sundry touches
Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess
Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness
(To get on faster) until at last her
Cheek grew to be one master-plaster
Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse;
In short, she grew from scalp to udder
Just the object to make you shudder.
R. BROWNING (_The Flight of the Duchess_).
* * * * *
Day is dying! Float, O Song,
Down the westward river,
Requiem chanting to the Day—
Day, the mighty Giver.
Pierced by shafts of Time he bleeds,
Melted rubies sending
Through the river and the sky,
Earth and heaven blending;
All the long-drawn earthy banks
Up to cloud-land lifting:
Slow between them drifts the swan,
’Twixt two heavens drifting.
Wings half open, like a flow’r
Inly deeper flushing,
Neck and breast as virgin’s pure—
Virgin proudly blushing.
Day is dying! Float, O swan,
Down the ruby river;
Follow, song, in requiem
To the mighty Giver.
GEORGE ELIOT (_The Spanish Gypsy_).
* * * * *
Nature, and nature’s laws, lay hid in night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
POPE
* * * * *
Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
’Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh, life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that we want.
TENNYSON (_The Two Voices_).
It is, perhaps, true that no one at any time longs for death;
and that our desire is for “more life _and fuller_.” But men
have for various reasons longed _to die_, though they may
not have longed for _death_. There are those to whom the
remainder of life will be one torment of pain to themselves
and a continuous mental distress to their friends; and there
have been men of firm religious belief who desired to pass
into a nobler _life_ beyond the grave. Again, Richard Hodgson
definitely assured me in 1897 that he _wished to die_. He was
absolutely satisfied with the evidence of survival after death,
which he had had in connection with the Society for Psychical
Research; and his desire was to “pass over” and be with the
friends with whom for years he had been in communication.
Hodgson was incapable of saying anything insincere.
* * * * *
Remember what Simonides said—that he never repented that he had held his
tongue, but often that he had spoken.
PLUTARCH (_Morals_).
* * * * *
Not the truth of which a man is or believes himself to be possessed, but
the earnest efforts which he has made to attain truth, make the worth of
the man. For it is not through the possession of, but through the search
for truth, that he develops those powers in which alone consists his
ever-growing perfection. Possession makes the mind stagnant, indolent,
proud.
If God held in His right hand all truth, and in His left the ever-living
desire for truth—although with the condition that I should remain in
error for ever—and if He said to me “Choose,” I should humbly bow before
His left hand, and say “Father, give; pure truth is for Thee alone.”
LESSING (1729-1781) _Wolfenbüttel Fragments_
When Lessing wrote this famous passage he was contending that
criticism should be absolutely free in regard to religious,
as to all other, subjects. “The argument on which he chiefly
relies is that the Bible cannot be considered necessary to a
belief in Christianity, since Christianity was a living and
conquering power before the New Testament in its present form
was recognised by the church. The true evidence for what is
essential in Christianity, he contends, is its adaptation
to the wants of human nature; hence the religious spirit is
undisturbed by the speculations of the boldest thinkers.”
(_Encyclopaedia Britannica_).
* * * * *
The light of every soul burns upward. Let us allow for atmospheric
disturbance.
G. MEREDITH (_Diana of the Crossways_).
* * * * *
Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage
method. According to that, each character is duly marshalled at first,
and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that, at the right
crises, each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain
falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction
in this—and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of
the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange
coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other,
and pass away. When the crisis comes, the man who would fit it does not
return. When the curtain falls, no one is ready. When the footlights are
brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one
knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the
players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing.
OLIVE SCHREINER (_The Story of an African Farm_).
This is from the preface to the second edition. This book must
be unique, for surely no other girl in her teens has written a
book so brilliant in itself and indicating such originality and
genius. It is a great loss to literature that the writer became
entirely absorbed in South African politics and controversy.
* * * * *
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes
perfectly like a Christian.
ALEXANDER POPE.
* * * * *
NIGHT AND DEATH
Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! creation widened in man’s view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad’st us blind!
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
J. BLANCO WHITE (1775-1841).
(See preface.) This sonnet, apart from its great excellence,
is a remarkable literary curiosity. By this one poem alone
Blanco White achieved a lasting reputation as a poet. The point
is that this is _his only poem_. He certainly had previously
written a sonnet of little merit on survival after death, but
“_Night and Death_” was apparently an inspired transfiguration
of his earlier effort. It is a startling instance of
inspiration coming to a man once only in his life—and then
coming in its very highest form. There are other poets, whose
work is generally of poor quality, but who have each produced
one surprisingly good poem which alone keeps their memory
alive. An instance of this is Christopher Smart (1722-1771),
who wrote several volumes of verse but only one fine poem, the
“Song of David.” Charles Wolfe (1791-1823) is also known only
by his “Burial of Sir John Moore,” but his other poems, though
forgotten, are said to have had some merit.
The sonnet is also interesting for another reason. White’s
family had settled in Spain for two generations, his
grandfather having changed his name to Blanco. His mother
was Spanish, he was educated in Spain, and became a Spanish
priest, and he did not leave for England until 1810, when
thirty-five years of age. Yet White’s beautiful thought could
hardly be expressed in finer language. There is, however, one
defect in the words “fly and leaf and insect.” (William Sharp
courageously altered “fly” into “flower.”)
Coleridge thought this “the finest and most grandly conceived
sonnet in our language.” Leigh Hunt said that in point of
thought it “stands supreme, perhaps, above all in any language:
nor can we ponder it too deeply, or with too hopeful a
reverence.”
* * * * *
I sleep, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I walk in my neighbour’s
pleasant fields and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight
in all that in which God delights—that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the
whole creation, and in God Himself. And he, that hath so many causes of
joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness,
who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little
handful of thorns.
JEREMY TAYLOR.
* * * * *
In my Progress travelling Northward,
Taking farewell of the Southward,
To Banbury came I, O prophane-One!
Where I saw a Puritane-One
Hanging of his Cat on Monday,
For killing of a Mouse on Sunday.
R. BRATHWAITE (1638) (_Drunken Barnaby_).
* * * * *
O the Spring will come,
And once again the wind be in the West,
Breathing the odour of the sea; and life,
Life that was ugly, and work that grew a curse,
Be God’s best gifts again, and in your heart
You’ll find once more the dreams you thought were dead.
H. D. LOWRY (_In Covent Garden_).
* * * * *
Of such as he was, there be few on Earth;
Of such as he is, there are many in Heaven;
And Life is all the sweeter that he lived,
And all he loved more sacred for his sake:
And Death is all the brighter that he died,
And Heaven is all the happier that he’s there.
GERALD MASSEY (_In Memoriam_).
* * * * *
ONLY SEVEN
(_A Pastoral Story, after Wordsworth._)
I marvelled why a simple child
That lightly draws its breath
Should utter groans so very wild,
And look as pale as Death.
Adopting a parental tone,
I asked her why she cried;
The damsel answered, with a groan,
“I’ve got a pain inside.
“I thought it would have sent me mad
Last night about eleven.”
Said I, “What is it makes you bad?
How many apples have you had?”
She answered, “Only seven!”
“And are you sure you took no more,
My little maid?” quoth I.
“Oh! please sir, mother gave me four,
But _they_ were in a pie!”
“If that’s the case,” I stammered out,
“Of course you’ve had eleven.”
The maiden answered, with a pout,
“I ain’t had more nor seven!”
I wondered hugely what she meant,
And said, “I’m bad at riddles,
But I know where little girls are sent
For telling tarrididdles.
“Now, if you don’t reform,” said I,
“You’ll never go to heaven.”
But all in vain; each time I try,
That little idiot makes reply,
“I ain’t had more nor seven”!
POSTSCRIPT.
To borrow Wordsworth’s name was wrong,
Or slightly misapplied;
And so I’d better call my song,
“Lines after _Ache-inside_.”
HENRY SAMBROOKE LEIGH.
It seems wicked to travesty Wordsworth’s tender little poem,
but Leigh’s verses amused us greatly when they appeared. Mark
Akenside (1721-1770) is a poet now almost forgotten.
* * * * *
The hour, which might have been, yet might not be,
Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore
Yet whereof life was barren,—on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time’s weary sea?
D. G. ROSSETTI (_Stillborn Love_).
* * * * *
Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be
no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for
the sunshine and the grass in those far-off days which live in us, and
transform our perception into love.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Mill on the Floss_).
The firmaments of daisies since to me
Have had those mornings in their opening eyes;
The bunched cowslip’s pale transparency
Carries that sunshine of sweet memories,
And wild-rose branches take their finest scent
From those blest hours of infantine content.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother and Sister_).
It will be observed that the thought is the same in both
passages.
* * * * *
Get thee behind the man I am now,
You man that I used to be.
R. BROWNING (_Martin Relph_).
* * * * *
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the
Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to
keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated,
and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to
desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the
earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear
the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They
travel by steam conveyance, yet with such baggage of old Asiatic thoughts
and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever
is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions
so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so
wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all
this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and
mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that
way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design,
beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us
turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity
must there not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that
old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of
Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in
the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of
porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
R. L. STEVENSON (_Across the Plains_).
* * * * *
I always wanted to make a clean breast of it;
And now it is made—why, my heart’s blood, that went trickle,
Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets,
Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle,
And genially floats me about the giblets.
R. BROWNING (_The Flight of the Duchess_).
* * * * *
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which
is but saying that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
ALEXANDER POPE.
* * * * *
We have all of us considerable regard for our past self, and are not fond
of casting reflections on that respected individual by a total negation
of his opinions.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Scenes from Clerical Life_).
* * * * *
SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH
Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main;