to her was only sacred clay, all unconscious that her Saviour had been
given back to her without seeing corruption, in a glorified and eternal
form, not dead, but alive for evermore, whom she could love with ever
increasing ardour of devotion: so, we say, there are not a few in our
time whose lot it is to wring their hands over the grave of lost ideas,
which they loved and their fathers loved, but for which God himself is
substituting ideas nobler and better far, which earlier ages failed to
grasp only because they were not in circumstances to feel their higher
worth.
One cannot demonstrate on any physical or visible basis whatever,
that it is a nobler thing to suffer injustice than to commit it, that
truth-speaking is honourable, forgiveness of injuries magnanimous, and
loving self-sacrifice for others sublime. Honour, purity, humility,
reverence, tenderness, courtesy, patience, these things cannot be weighed
on physical scales, cannot be handled or touched, or melted or frozen in
any mechanical or chemical laboratory. They belong to a different order
of realities from acids and vapours: they are denizens of what, for want
of any more definite or accurate expression, we are accustomed to call
the spiritual world.
One can see how religion should, to a young person, be associated with
repressive and prohibitive laws. Youth is the time for the luxuriating of
newborn, and, therefore, delicious vital forces. But its very luxuriance
is disorderly, and religion cannot coexist with disorder. Therefore,
that which is so continually warning the young against impulse, and
passion, and irregularity, ought not to be too greatly displeased if it
should, by and by, come to be regarded by the young as a synonym for
mere repressive force, and, therefore, as an unpleasant and unpopular
thing. I believe, too, that there is no exception to the uniformity of
the experience, that all young countries adopt freer systems of religion,
and divest religious bodies more completely of all political and properly
coercive power than older countries. It is all an illustration of the
same thing. Young life, which most needs regulation, most dislikes it.[33]
As the genius of the bard is in the poem, as the wisdom of the legislator
is in the law, as the skill of the mechanician is in the engine, as
the soul of the musician is in the harmony and melody, as the words of
a man’s lips issue from the inner world of his mental and spiritual
character—so every work of God, and conspicuously man, as the noblest of
God’s works, may truly be said to shadow forth a portion of the mind of
God.
We talk of creation as a past thing. But the truth is, creation is
eternal. Creation never ceases. Every time the clouds drop in rain, every
time the waters freeze into new ice, every time the juices of nature
gather into another violet, every time a new wail of life is heard upon
a mother’s breast, every time you breathe another sigh, or shed another
tear, there is God as truly present in His miraculous creative capacity
as on the day when He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
P. S. MENZIES (_Sermons_).
Apart from their intrinsic value, the above extracts are
given because this book of sermons is of special interest to
Australians and because it has passed into oblivion. There are
very few copies in existence.
Menzies came from Glasgow to Scots Church, Melbourne, in 1868
and died at the early age of thirty-four in 1874. At the
Glasgow University he had been largely influenced mentally and
spiritually by Principal Caird.
The sermons published in this book were selected by his widow
after his death. Although not revised by their gifted young
author, the fine thoughts expressed in chaste and beautiful
language remind one of James Martineau.
* * * * *
Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions—like effects of
colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.
GEORGE ELIOT (_The Lifted Veil_).
* * * * *
My _Galligaskins_ that have long withstood
The Winter’s Fury, and incroaching Frosts,
By Time subdued, (what will not Time subdue!)
An horrid Chasm disclose, with Orifice
Wide, discontinuous.
JOHN PHILLIPS (1676-1709) (_The Splendid
Shilling_).
_Galligaskins_, trunk-hose. “The Splendid Shilling” is a famous
parody on Milton.
* * * * *
We would not pray that sorrow ne’er may shed
Her dews along the pathway they must tread;
The sweetest flowers would never bloom at all,
If no least rain of tears did ever fall.
GERALD MASSEY (_Via Crucis, Via Lucis_).
* * * * *
But his wings will not rest and his feet will not stay for us;
Morning is here in the joy of its might;
With his breath has he sweetened a night and a day for us;
Now let him pass and the myrtles make way for us;
Love can but last in us here at his height
For a day and a night.
SWINBURNE (_At Parting_).
* * * * *
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not
yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our
frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling
of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and
the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on
the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well
wadded with stupidity.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).
In the story Dorothea has found her husband to be a man of
narrow mind and unsympathetic nature. Such a disillusionment
after marriage frequently happens, and we are not deeply
moved by what is not unusual, although it may mean a real
life-tragedy. Ruskin says “God gives the disposition to every
healthy human mind in some degree to pass over or even harden
itself against evil things, else the suffering would be too
great to be borne” (_Modern Painters_ v., xix., 32). Only thus
could we have lived through the horrors of the present war.
George Eliot’s analogy between intensity of the emotions and
acuteness of the senses reminds one of Pope’s lines (“Essay on
Man,” Ep. I.) where he says life would be insupportable, if we
had the acute hearing, smell and other senses of insects and
other animals; we should
Die of a rose in aromatic pain.
* * * * *
Man that passes by
So like to God, so like the beasts that die.
W. MORRIS (_The Earthly Paradise_).
* * * * *
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not in semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power,
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and bye.
R. BROWNING (_Abt Vogler_).
Abt—or Abbé—Georg Joseph Vogler, 1749-1814, a German organist
and composer, is probably chosen by Browning because, although
an important musician, his compositions have perished. In this
fine poem Vogler has been extemporizing, and his inspired music
has lifted him in ecstasy to heaven. The sounds are his slaves
who have built palaces of music, as in the Arab legends angels
and demons built magic structures for Solomon. He grieves that
this wonderful music should apparently have vanished for ever;
but is comforted by the thought that no good thing, no fine
aspiration, no great effort or noble impulse can really die,
but must exist for ever in the mind of God.
If Browning had known the evidence now afforded scientifically
by hypnotism and otherwise, he might have come to the
conclusion that all our thoughts and feelings, _both good
and bad_, are recorded deep down in our own consciousness.
Moreover, the existence of thought-transference leads to the
somewhat dreadful suggestion that this record of all our
inmost thoughts and feelings may possibly become open to the
inspection of every one.
The quotation reminds one of Wordsworth’s sonnet on the “Inside
of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.”
Where music dwells
Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.
* * * * *
... Had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth;
Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:—
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
ROBERT BROWNING (_Abt Vogler_).
See the preceding note. The poet says that Painting and Poetry
are “art in obedience to laws,” but the musician exerts a
higher _creative_ will akin to that of God. The painter has
before him the pictures he reproduces, the poet borrows
his imagery from visible things and has apt words in which
to express his thoughts: the musician has nothing visible,
nothing outside his own soul, to assist him, and can use only
the meaningless sounds which we hear everywhere around us. By
combining, however, three of those empty sounds (in a chord)
he evolves a fourth sound, which so transcends all that other
arts can do in expressing emotion that Browning compares it to
a “star.”
But this expresses only part of the poet’s meaning. In using
this tremendous comparison to a _star_, as also in enthroning
music supreme above art and poetry, he means that it transcends
their loftiest flights and rises _above our world_ to the
heavens above. In the earlier part of the poem the “pinnacled
glory” built by the slaves of sound at the bidding of the
musician’s soul is based “broad on the roots of things” and
ascends until it “attains to heaven.”
F. W. H. Myers, in “The Renewal of Youth,” has a passage on
music. His theme is that while music (as in Mozart’s operas)
may express human passion, it also (as in Beethoven) rises
to greater heights and appears to voice the emotions of a
world beyond our senses. In the lines I have italicized in
the following passage he no doubt refers to Browning’s line,
“That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a
star!”—the “star” meaning that music ascends to a higher world
than our own:—
... Music is a creature bound,
A voice not ours, the imprisoned soul of sound,—
Who fain would bend down hither and find her part
In the strong passion of a hero’s heart,
Or one great hour constrains herself to sing
Pastoral peace and waters wandering;—
_Then hark how on a chord she is rapt and flown_
_To that true world thou seest not nor hast known_,
Nor speech of thine can her strange thought unfold,
The bars’ wild beat, and ripple of running gold.
Not only does Browning unselfishly assert that the sister-art
is superior to his own, but he goes further, and doubts if
music is not the greatest of all man’s gifts. I do not discuss
either contention—leaving musicians to rejoice in the tribute
of a great poet.
* * * * *
Although a gem be cast away,
And lie obscured in heaps of clay,
Its precious worth is still the same;
Although vile dust be whirled to heaven,
To it no dignity is given,
Still base as when from earth it came.
SADI (_L. S. Costello’s translation_).
* * * * *
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done....
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
TENNYSON (_Ulysses_).
* * * * *
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad.
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kissed me.
LEIGH HUNT.
“Jenny” was Mrs. Carlyle.
* * * * *
A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides
And o’er the heart of man: invisibly
It comes, to works of unreproved delight
And tendency benign, directing those
Who care not, know not, think not what they do.
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby; romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours,
And _they must_ have their food. Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements.
WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude_, Bk. V.)
* * * * *
The world is so inconveniently constituted, that the vague consciousness
of being a fine fellow is no guarantee of success in any line of business.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother Jacob_).
* * * * *
Wasted, weary,—wherefore stay
Wrestling thus with earth and clay!
From the body pass away!—
Hark! the mass is singing.
From thee doff thy mortal weed,
Mary Mother be thy speed,
Saints to help thee at thy need!
Hark! the knell is ringing.
Fear not snow-drift driving past,
Sleet, or hail, or levin blast;
Soon the shroud shall lap thee fast,
And the sleep be on thee cast
That shall know no waking.
Haste thee, haste thee to be gone,
Earth flits past, and time draws on,—
Gasp thy gasp, and groan thy groan,
Day is near the breaking.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
From _Guy Mannering_. Scott says it is a prayer or spell, which
was used in Scotland or Northern England to speed the passage
of a parting spirit, like the tolling of a bell in Catholic
days.
* * * * *
The world is full of Woodmen who expel
Love’s gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell.
SHELLEY (_The Woodman and the Nightingale_).
* * * * *
Evil of every kind, being familiar to us as an _object_ of apprehension,
appears to be external to ourselves. And yet it is invested with the
greater part of its severity by the mind: it acts upon us by the ideas
it awakens, the affections it wounds, the aspirations it disappoints. If
its outward pressure were all, and it dealt with us as beings of sense
alone, it would lose most of its poignancy and would dwindle down into a
few animal pangs.... It is our higher nature that creates immeasurably
the greater part of the ills we endure: they are ideal, not sensible:
and it is the privilege of reason to have tears instead of groans; of
love to know grief instead of pain; of conscience to replace uneasiness
with remorse.... Penury, disgrace, bereavement, guilt, are evils which we
must be human in order to feel; and it is the penalty of our nobleness,
not only to be weighed down by their occasional burthen, but to be
perpetually haunted by the phantom of their approach.
JAMES MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, II, 150).
* * * * *
Two or three of them got round me, and begged me for the twentieth time
to tell them the name of my country. Then, as they could not pronounce
it satisfactorily, they insisted that I was deceiving them, and that it
was a name of my own invention. One funny old man, who bore a ludicrous
resemblance to a friend of mine at home, was almost indignant. “Unglung!”
said he, “who ever heard of such a name?—anglang, angerlang—_that_ can’t
be the name of your country; you are playing with us.” Then he tried to
give a convincing illustration. “My country is Wanumbai—anybody can say
Wanumbai. I’m an orang-Wanumbai; but N-glung! who ever heard of such a
name? Do tell us the real name of your country, and when you are gone
we shall know how to talk about you.” To this luminous argument and
remonstrance I could oppose nothing but assertion, and the whole party
remained firmly convinced that I was for some reason or other deceiving
them.
A. R. WALLACE (_The Malay Archipelago_).
* * * * *
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
LONGFELLOW (_Tales of a Wayside Inn_).
This was written in 1863, but ten years earlier Alexander
Smith, in “A Life Drama,” had written:
We twain have met like the ships upon the sea,
Who hold an hour’s converse, so short, so sweet;
One little hour! and then away they speed
On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam,
To meet no more.
Other writers have also used the same simile. See next poem.
* * * * *
QUA CURSUM VENTUS
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:
E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?
At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered—
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!
To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.
But O blithe breeze! and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.
One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,—
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!
At last, at last, unite them there!
A. H. CLOUGH.
Two friends, who through absence have become “soul from soul
estranged,” are compared to two ships, which unconsciously draw
apart during the night and must continue a diverging course;
but, being both bound for the same port, will at the end of
their life-voyage be re-united.
* * * * *
Speak to Him thou, for He hears—and Spirit with Spirit can meet—
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
TENNYSON (_The Higher Pantheism_).
Tennyson, here and elsewhere (see, for example, the king’s
beautiful speech in “The Passing of Arthur”) urges us to
_prayer_, and adds his belief in a personal intercourse with
an ever-present and loving God. Innumerable men of the highest
character during nineteen centuries have testified to the same
direct communion with the Almighty.
* * * * *
A third in sugar with unscriptural hand
Traffics and builds a lasting house on sand.
ALFRED AUSTIN (_The Golden Age_).
* * * * *
Thou canst not in life’s city
Rule thy course as in a cell:
There are others, all thy brothers,
Who have work to do as well.
Some events that mar thy purpose
May light _them_ upon their way;
Our sun-shining in declining
Gives earth’s other side the day.
R. A. VAUGHAN (_Hours with the Mystics_).
* * * * *
My little craft sails not alone;
A thousand fleets from every zone
Are out upon a thousand seas;
And what for me were favouring breeze
Might dash another, with the shock
Of doom, upon some hidden rock.
And so I do not dare to pray
For winds to waft me on my way.
CATHERINE ATHERTON MASON.
* * * * *
A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it,
are exactly like a jerkin and a jerkin’s lining: rumple the one, you
rumple the other.
STERNE (_Tristram Shandy_).
* * * * *
Il (Boucher) trouvait la nature trop verte et mal éclairée. Et son ami,
Lancret, le peintre des salons à la mode, lui répondait: “Je suis de
votre sentiment, la nature manque d’harmonie et de séduction.”
(He, Boucher, found nature too green and badly lit. And his friend,
Lancret, the fashionable painter of the day, replied to him, “I am of
your opinion, nature is wanting in harmony and seductiveness.”)
CHARLES BLANC.
See following quotation.
* * * * *
If you examine the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, you
will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the
country, show ... either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear,
both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. Nothing is more
remarkable than the general conception of the country merely as a series
of green fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime
scenery. The love of fresh air and green grass forced itself upon the
animal natures of men; but that of the sublimer features of scenery had
no place in minds whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms
of the age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, and in
the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest
in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from their
heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting anything
beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett,
Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière, and the writings of
Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression
of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Perhaps Sterne’s
_Sentimental Journey_, in its total absence of sentiment on any subject
but humanity, and its entire want of notice of anything at Geneva which
might not as well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking
instance I could give you; and if you compare with this negation of
feeling on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds
and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very
accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
JOHN RUSKIN (_Architecture and Painting_).
* * * * *
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six,
result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty
pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf
is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in
short, you are for ever floored. As I am!”
CHARLES DICKENS (_David Copperfield_).
* * * * *
And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul, when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
HENRY VAUGHAN (_Friends Departed_).
This is Vision.
* * * * *
... The trial-test
Appointed to all flesh at some one stage
Of soul’s achievement—when the strong man doubts
His strength, the good man whether goodness be,
The artist in the dark seeks, fails to find
Vocation, and the saint forswears his shrine.
R. BROWNING (_The Inn Album_).
* * * * *
I sits with my toes in a brook;
If anyone asks me for why,
I hits him a rap with my crook—
’Tis sentiment kills me, says I.
HORACE WALPOLE.
This was written in a game of _bouts rimés_ (rhymed ends). Four
lines had to be composed ending with “brook,” “why,” “crook,”
“I.”
* * * * *
Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west.
And I said in underbreath,—all our life is mixed with death,
And who knoweth which is best?
Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west,
And I smiled to think God’s greatness flowed around our incompleteness—
Round our restlessness, His rest.
E. B. BROWNING (_Rhyme of the Duchess May_).
* * * * *
I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not: but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!
R. BROWNING (_Paracelsus_).
Referring to Bryant’s poem, “To a Waterfowl”:—
He who from zone to zone
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
* * * * *
Souvent femme varie,
Bien fol est qui s’y fie!
(Woman is very fickle,
Great fool he who trusts in her!)
VICTOR HUGO (_Le Roi s’amuse_).