And beckon’d with her hand:
“Dear Knight,” she said, “thy prayer hath sped
Unto the heavenly land.
“Come forth with me: the night is free
For us to work the thing
That is to do, before we two
Shall hear the dawn-bird sing.
“Saddle thy steed, Sir Knight, with speed,
Thy faithfullest,” quoth she,
“For many a tide we twain must ride
Before the end shall be.”
The steed is girt, black Dagobert,
Swift-footed as the wind;
The knight leapt up upon his croup,
The maid sprang up behind.
The wind screams past; they ride so fast,—
Like troops of souls in pain
The snowdrifts spin, but none may win
To rest upon the twain.
So fast they ride, the blasts divide
To let them hurry on;
The wandering ghosts troop past in hosts
Across the moonlight wan.
A singing light did cleave the night,
High up a hill rode they;
The veils of Heaven for them were riven,
And all the skies pour’d day.
The golden gate did stand await,
The golden town did lie
Before their sight, the realms of light
God builded in the sky.
The steed did wait before the gate,
Sheer up the street looked they.
They saw the bliss in Heaven that is,
They saw the saints’ array.
They saw the hosts upon the coasts
Of the clear crystal sea;
They saw the blest, that in the rest
Of Christ for ever be.
The choirs of God pulsed full and broad
Upon the ravish’d twain;
The angels’ feet upon the street
Rang out like golden rain.
Then said the maid, “Be not afraid,
God giveth heaven to thee;
Light down and rest with Christ His blest,
And think no more of me!”
Sir Loibich gazed, as one sore dazed,
Awhile upon the place:
Then, with a sigh, he turned his eye
Upon the maiden’s face.
“By Christ His troth!” he swore an oath,
“No heaven for me shall be,
Unless God give that thou shalt live
In heaven for aye with me.”
“Ah, curst am I!” the maid did cry;
“My place thou knowest well;
I must begone before the dawn,
To harbour me in hell.”
“By Christ His rest!” he beat his breast,
“Then be it even so;
With thee in hell I choose to dwell
And share with thee thy woe!
“Thy sin was mine,—By Christ His wine,
Mine too shall be thy doom;
What part have I within the sky,
And thou in Hell’s red gloom?”
The vision broke, as thus he spoke,
The city waned away:
O’er hill and brake, o’er wood and lake
Once more the darkness lay.
O’er hill and plain they ride again,
Under the night’s black spell,
Until there rise against the skies
The lurid lights of hell.
The dreadful cries they rend the skies,
The plain is ceil’d with fire:
The flames burst out, around, about,
The heats of hell draw nigher.
Unfear’d they ride; against the side
Of the red flameful sky
Grim forms are thrown, strange shapes upgrown
From out Hell’s treasury.
Fast rode the twain across the plain,
With hearts all undismay’d,
Until they came where all a-flame
Hell’s gates were open laid.
The awful stead gaped wide and red,
To gulph them in its womb:
There could they see the fiery sea
And all the souls in doom.
There came a breath, like living death,
Out of the gated way:
It scorched his face with its embrace,
It turn’d his hair to grey.
Then said the maid, “Art not dismay’d?
Here is our course fulfill’d:
Wilt thou not turn, nor rest to burn
With me, as God hath will’d?”
“By Christ His troth!” he swore an oath,
“Thy doom with thee dree I!
Here will we dwell, hand-link’d in hell,
Unseverèd for aye!”
He spurr’d his steed; the gates of dread
Gaped open for his course;
Sudden outrang a trumpet’s clang,
And backwards fell the horse.
The ghostly maid did wane and fade,
The lights of hell did flee;
Alone in night the mazèd wight
Stood on the frozen lea.
Out shone the moon; the mists were blown
Away before his sight
And through the dark he saw a spark,
A welcoming of light.
Thither he fared, with falchion bared,
Toward the friendly shine;
Eftsoon he came to where a flame
Did burn within a shrine.
Down on his knee low louted he
Before the cross of wood,
And for her spright he saw that night
Long pray’d he to the Rood.[41]
And as he pray’d, with heart down-weigh’d,
A wondrous thing befell:
He saw a light, and through the night
There rang a silver bell.
The earth-mists drew from off his view,
He saw God’s golden town;
He saw the street, he saw the seat
From whence God looketh down.
He saw the gate transfigurate,—
He saw the street of pearl,
And in the throng, the saints among,
He saw a gold-hair’d girl.
He saw a girl as white as pearl,
With hair as red as gold:
He saw her stand among the band
Of angels manifold.
He heard her smite the harp’s delight,
Singing most joyfully,
And knew his love prevail’d above
Judgment and destiny.
...
Gone is the night, the morn breaks white
Across the eastward hill;
The knightly sire by the dead fire
Sits in the dawning chill.
By the hearth white, there sits the knight,
Dead as the sunken fire;
But on his face is writ the grace
Of his fulfill’d desire.
JOHN PAYNE (b. 1841).
This poem is cut down one-half and thereby loses much of its
effect. Two adventures, in which the Knight refuses temptation
and adheres to his oath, are entirely omitted.
* * * * *
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
They parted—ne’er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been reft asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Christabel_).
* * * * *
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,
Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night,
And would have told him half his Troy was burnt.
SHAKESPEARE (_2 Henry IV._)
This and the next five quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).
* * * * *
That strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.[42]
TENNYSON (_Tithonus_).
* * * * *
Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy
Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,
Cricketing below, rush’d brown and red with sunshine;
O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool!
Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher
Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak.
Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,
Said, “I will kiss you:” she laughed and lean’d her cheek.
G. MEREDITH (_Love in the Valley_).
* * * * *
One there is, the loveliest of them all,
Some sweet lass of the valley, looking out
For gains, and who that sees her would not buy?
Fruits of her father’s orchard are her wares,
And with the ruddy produce she walks round
Among the crowd, half pleased with, half ashamed
Of her new office, blushing restlessly.
WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude, Bk. VIII._)
* * * * *
Out came the children running—
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
R. BROWNING (_The Pied Piper of Hamelin_).
* * * * *
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon:
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.
KEATS (_The Eve of St. Agnes_).
The above are from a series of word-pictures (see pp. 86, 122).
* * * * *
If the collective energies of the universe are identified with Divine
Will, and the system is thus animate with an eternal consciousness as
its moulding life, the conception we frame of its history will conform
itself to our experience of intellectual volition. It is in origination,
in disposing of new conditions, in setting up order by differentiation,
that the mind exercises its highest function. When the product has been
obtained, and a definite method of procedure established, the strain
upon us is relaxed, habit relieves the constant demand for creation,
and at length the rules of a practised art almost execute themselves.
As the intensely voluntary thus works itself off into the automatic,
thought, liberated from this reclaimed and settled province breaks into
new regions, and ascends to ever higher problems: its supreme life being
beyond the conquered and legislated realm, while a lower consciousness,
if any at all, suffices for the maintenance of its ordered mechanism. Yet
all the while it is one and the same mind that, under different modes of
activity, thinks the fresh thoughts and carries on the old usages. Does
anything forbid us to conceive similarly of the cosmical development;
that it started from the freedom of indefinite possibilities and the
ubiquity of universal consciousness; that, as intellectual exclusions
narrowed the field, and traced the definite lines of admitted movement,
the tension of purpose, less needed on these, left them as the habits of
the universe, and operated rather for higher and ever higher ends not
yet provided for; that the more mechanical, therefore, a natural law
may be, the further is it from its source; and that the inorganic and
unconscious portion of the world, instead of being the potentiality of
the organic and conscious, is rather its residual precipitate, formed
as the Indwelling Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim on the upper
margin of the ordered whole, and especially on the inner life of natures
that can resemble him?
JAMES MARTINEAU (1805-1900) (_Modern Materialism_).
The remarkably fine and suggestive essay in which this passage
occurs was written in 1876, in the course of a discussion
raised by Tyndall’s Belfast Address. It is not easy to
appreciate the speculation that Martineau offers in direct
opposition to the theory of Darwinism without reading his
preceding argument.
It may be well to begin with a quotation from his sermon,
“Perfection, Divine and Human”: “However vast and majestic the
uniformities of nature, they are nevertheless finite: science
counts them one by one; a completed science would count them
all. God, however, is not finite; He lives out beyond the
legislation He has made; and His thought, which defines the
rules of matter, does not transmigrate into them and cease
else-how to be; _but merely flings out the law as an emanating
act, and Himself abides behind as Thinking Power_.”
In the present essay Martineau first develops the argument that
there is only one Power that exercises all the forces in the
universe, whether mechanical, chemical, or vital. That power is
God, the Indwelling Mind of the world. He is of like nature to
(although infinitely higher than) His highest product, which
is conscious, thinking, and willing man. Seeing that God and
man are alike in their natures, Martineau proceeds to draw an
analogy between the history of the world and the history of
man’s own development. The Divine Mind at first _consciously_
exercises the forces that we know as gravitation, cohesion,
chemical attraction, etc.; just as, to take a simple example,
a baby has at first consciously to use its muscles and balance
its body in the process of walking. Later the baby, having
formed the _habit_, does all this _unconsciously_ and, while
walking, can pay attention to other matters. So the Indwelling
Mind of the world forms its _habits_ which we know as the laws
of gravitation, etc., and is free to attend to higher and
higher objects. In this progress there is no evolution of the
organic from the inorganic, or of the higher from the lower
forms of life. Inorganic matter, having become subject to fixed
laws, is precipitated and dropped out of further conscious
effort; also each lower form of life is similarly laid aside
as the Indwelling Mind proceeds to the higher forms, until
finally man is reached. The highest result thus arrived at is
the production of conscious _Mind_. All this involves what is
usually known as Special Creation, and the idea of “God at His
working-bench” creating one species after another is regarded
as absurd. But it is not absurd on Martineau’s argument,
because the Indwelling Mind is constantly doing the whole work
of the world (and also because a fact to be accounted for
by any theory is that a higher form of existence _appears_
whenever the environment is suitable). In the present state
of our knowledge Martineau’s speculation cannot be proved or
disproved, but it may contain the germ of a true scheme of the
universe—which scheme is yet far to seek. In any case, he makes
the important point that the nature of _power_ in the world
must be judged from the best thing it has done—namely, the
_minds_ it has produced. The idea of a blind, unconscious force
is incompatible with the fact that _that force has produced
conscious mind_. It is the same argument as the Psalmist uses,
“He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the
eye, shall He not see? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall
not He know?” (Ps. xciv, 9, 10.) The following (by whom written
I do not know) has the same idea: “Every thing is a thought,
and bears a relation to the thought that placed it there, and
the thought that finds it there.” It is interesting to consider
Martineau’s suggestion with that of William James on p. 165.
* * * * *
There’s lifeless matter; add the power of shaping,
And you’ve the crystal: add again the organs,
Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form
And manner of one’s self, and you’ve the plant:
Add power of motion, senses, and so forth,
And you’ve all kind of beasts; suppose a pig:
To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff,
Then you have man. What shall we add to man,
To bring him higher?
T. L. BEDDOES (1803-1849) (_Death’s Jest-Book_,
V. 2).
_Death’s Jest-Book_ was published in 1850, after Beddoes’
death; _The Origin of Species_ appeared in 1859: the passage
is, therefore, curious. In suggesting, however, development by
the addition of faculties, it affords no explanation how those
faculties came to be added.
* * * * *
“OUTLANDISH PROVERBS”
Love rules his kingdom without a sword.
He plays well that wins.
The offender never pardons.
Nothing dries sooner than a tear.
Three women can hold their peace—if two are away.
A woman conceals what she knows not.
Saint Luke was a Saint and a Physician, yet is dead.[43]
Were there no hearers, there would be no backbiters.
He will burn his house to warm his hands.
The buyer needs a hundred eyes, the seller not one.
Ill ware is never cheap.
Punishment is lame—but it comes.
Gluttony kills more than the sword.[44]
The filth under the white snow the sun discovers.
You cannot know wine by the barrel.
At length the fox is brought to the furrier.
Love your neighbour, yet pull not down your hedge.
None is a fool always, every one sometimes.[45]
In a great river great fish are found, but take heed lest you be drowned.
I wept when I was born, and every day shows why.
The honey is sweet, but the bee stings.
Gossips are frogs, they drink and talk.
He is a fool that thinks not that another thinks.
He that sows, trusts in God.
He that hath one hog makes him fat, and he that hath one son makes him
a fool.
Where your will is ready, your feet are light.
A fair death honours the whole life.
To a good spender God is the treasurer.
The choleric man never wants woe.
Love makes a good eye squint.
He that would have what he hath not should do what he doth not.
A wise man cares not for what he cannot have.
The fat man knoweth not what the lean thinketh.
In every country dogs bite.
None says his garner is full.
To a close-shorn sheep, God gives wind by measure.[46]
Silks and satins put out the fire in the chimney.
Lawyers’ houses are built on the heads of fools.
It is better to have wings than horns.
We have more to do when we die than we have done.
GEORGE HERBERT’S _Jacula Prudentum_.
The reader may not know of the “saintly Herbert’s” collection
of “Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, etc.” from which the few
examples above are taken.
* * * * *
AVALON.
We seek a land beneath the early beams
Of stars that rise beyond the sunset gate,
Where all the year the twilight lingers late,
Athwart whose coast the last-born sunray gleams.
Fair are the fields and full of pleasant streams,
Far sound the hedge-rows with the burgher bees,
Soft are the winds and taste of southern seas,
Night brings no longing there, and sleep no dreams.
O tillerman, steer true, while we, who bow
Above the oar-shafts, sing the land we seek,
Land of the past, its rapture and its ruth;
Future we ask none, we are memories now,
We bear the years whose lips no longer speak,
And round our galley’s prow the name is Youth.
ROBERT CAMERON ROGERS (b. 1862).
An American author who wrote the well-known song, “The Rosary.”
* * * * *
IF I COULD HOLD YOUR HANDS
If I could hold your hands to-night,
Just for a little while, and know
That only I, of all the world,
Possessed them so:
A slender shape in that old chair,
If I could see you here to-night,
Between me and the twilight pale—
So light and frail,
Your cool white dress, its folding lost
In one broad sweep of shadow grey;
Your weary head just drooped aside,
That sweet old way,
Bowed like a flower-cup dashed with rain,
The darkness crossing half your face,
And just the glimmer of a smile
For one to trace:
If I could see your eyes that reach
Far out into the farthest sky,
Where past the trail of dying suns
The old years lie:
Or touch your silent lips to-night,
And steal the sadness from their smile,
And find the last kiss they have kept
This weary while:
If it could be—Oh, all in vain
The restless trouble of my soul
Sets, as the great tides of the moon,
Toward your control!
In vain the longings of the lips,
The eye’s desire and the pain;
The hunger of the heart—O love,
_Is_ it in vain?
ANON.
* * * * *
A Cibo biscocto,
A medico indocto,
Ab inimico reconciliato,
A mala muliere
Libera nos, Domine.
(From twice-cooked food, from an ignorant doctor, from a reconciled
enemy, from a wicked woman, Lord, deliver us.)
_Old Monkish Litany._
* * * * *
CONSTANCY REWARDED
I vowed unvarying faith, and she,
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.
COVENTRY PATMORE (_The Angel in the House_).
* * * * *
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human
spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every
moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills
or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or
intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us—for
that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is
the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated,
dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by
the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point,
and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital
forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy,
is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is
to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world,
and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two
persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet,
we may catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge
that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or
any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious
odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not
to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about
us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces
on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before
evening....
We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite
reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some
spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest,
at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one
chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations
as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this
quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of
enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise which come naturally to
many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit
of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic
passion, the desire of beauty, the love for art’s sake, has most; for art
comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality
to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
WALTER PATER (1839-1894) (_The Renaissance_).
In the Adelaide edition of this book this famous “pulsation”
passage appeared as originally written; it is now given as
Pater afterwards altered it.
Pater was a Hellenist and preached the new paganism of last
century. The Greek ideal life was supposed to be one of purely
aesthetic enjoyment, divorced from religious problems or from
any sense of the _higher_ in our nature. Pater, however,
altered his views, _Marius, the Epicurean_, being intended as a
recantation, and he became in effect an Anglo-Catholic. (See p.
343 note.)
Pater was “Rose” in Mallock’s _New Republic_.
* * * * *
A CHILD
Is a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted
of the Apple.... He is nature’s fresh picture, newly drawn in oil,
which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white
paper, unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length
it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no
evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He kisses
and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his
beater.... His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loth to use
so deceitful an organ.... We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game
is our earnest: and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems
and mocking of man’s business. His father hath writ him as his own little
story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember;
and sighs to see what innocence he has outlived. The older he grows, he
is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his
breeches.... Could he put off his body with his little Coat, he had got
eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.
JOHN EARLE (_Micro-Cosmographie_, 1628).
* * * * *
As when a Gryphon through the wilderness
With wingèd course, o’er hill and moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold.
MILTON (_Paradise Lost_).
The Griffin, with head and wings of a bird and body of a
lion, is pursuing, “half on foot, half flying,” the one-eyed
Arimaspian, who is fleeing on horseback with the purloined
gold. The Griffins guarded mines of gold and hidden treasure.
(_Herodotus_, iv, 27.)
* * * * *
A WOMAN’S THOUGHT
I am a woman—therefore I may not
Call to him, cry to him,
Fly to him,
Bid him delay not!
Then when he comes to me, I must sit quiet;
Still as a stone—
All silent and cold.
If my heart riot—
Crush and defy it!
Should I grow bold,
Say one dear thing to him,
All my life fling to him,
Cling to him—
What to atone
Is enough for my sinning?
This were the cost to me,
This were my winning—
That he were lost to me.
Not as a lover
At last if he part from me,
Tearing my heart from me,
Hurt beyond cure—
Calm and demure
Then must I hold me,
In myself fold me,
Lest he discover;
Showing no sign to him
By look of mine to him
What he has been to me—
How my heart turns to him,
Follows him, yearns to him,
Prays him to love me.
Pity me, lean to me,
Thou God above me!
RICHARD WATSON GILDER (1844-1909).
* * * * *
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of
his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
MACAULAY (_On Niccolo Machiavelli_).
A wonderful record, if it were correct, but “Old Nick” is said
to be derived from Scandinavian mythology.
* * * * *
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare
a little the more as I grow older.
MONTAIGNE (Essay, _Of Repentance_).
* * * * *