Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Clos'd o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?
I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than
on seeing my old friend G.D., who had been paying me a morning
visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking
leave, instead of turning down the right hand path by which he had
entered--with staff in hand, and at noon day, deliberately march right
forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally
disappear. A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling
enough; but, in the broad open daylight, to witness such an unreserved
motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me all
power of speculation.
How I found my feet, I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some
spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the
silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff
(the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the
skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders,
and I--freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises.
And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry
passers by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in
the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to
communicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously
the application, or non-application, of salt, &c., to the person of
the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of
conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a
bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the counsel
was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on,--shall I
confess?--in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken.
Great previous exertions--and mine had not been inconsiderable--are
commonly followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of
irresolution.
MONOCULUS--for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose
to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared--is a grave,
middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or
truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion
of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of
unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere
vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He omitteth
no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common
surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by
a too wilful application of the plant _Cannabis_ outwardly. But though
he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation
tendeth for the most part to water-practice; for the convenience
of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand
repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and night, from his
little watch-tower, at the Middleton's-Head, he listeneth to detect
the wrecks of drowned mortality--partly, as he saith, to be upon the
spot--and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe
to himself and his patients, on these distressing occasions, are
ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostelries,
than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived
to such finesse by practice, that it is reported, he can distinguish
a plunge at a half furlong distance; and can tell, if it be casual or
deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a
sad brown, but which, by time, and frequency of nightly divings, has
been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of
Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy--after
a sufficient application of warm blankets, friction, &c., is a simple
tumbler, or more, of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as
the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in the case of my
friend, a squeamish subject, he condescendeth to be the taster; and
showeth, by his own example, the innocuous nature of the prescription.
Nothing can be more kind or encouraging than this procedure. It addeth
confidence to the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in
hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own
draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion?
In fine, MONOCULUS is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender
pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out
in the endeavour to save the lives of others--his pretensions so
moderate, that with difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for the
price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to
society as G.D.
It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon
the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake
to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential
deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent
life. Sitting up in my couch--my couch which, naked and void of
furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered,
shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth
be a state-bed at Colebrooke,--he discoursed of marvellous escapes--by
carelessness of nurses--by pails of gelid, and kettles of the
boiling element, in infancy--by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs,
in schoolboy frolics--by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of
heavier tomes at Pembroke--by studious watchings, inducing frightful
vigilance--by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings
of the learned head.--Anon, he would burst out into little fragments
of chaunting--of songs long ago--ends of deliverance-hymns, not
remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his
heart was made tender as a child's--for the _tremor cordis_, in the
retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger,
acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which
we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter
crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon,
and to mutter of shallow rivers.
Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton--what a spark you were like to have
extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now
near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a
moment washing away. Mockery of a river--liquid artifice--wretched
conduit! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts. Was
it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that
Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your
tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through
green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?--Ye have no swans--no
Naiads--no river God--or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend
tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius
of your waters?
Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy
in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist
sepulture?--or, having no _name_, besides that unmeaning assumption
of _eternal novity_, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and
henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?
And could such spacious virtue find a grave
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave?
I protest, George, you shall not venture out again--no, not by
daylight--without a sufficient pair of spectacles--in your musing
moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your
presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go
wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man,
to turn dipper at your years' after your many tracts in favour of
sprinkling only!
I have nothing but water in my head o' nights since this frightful
accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I
behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother
Hopeful (that is to me), "I sink in deep waters; the billows go over
my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me
Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save.
Next follow--a mournful procession--_suicidal faces_, saved against
their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant
gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet
hue-constrained Lazari--Pluto's half-subjects--stolen fees from the
grave-bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion--or is it
G.D.?--in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand,
and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight,
intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal
streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained
to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy
death.
And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one
of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable
precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the
sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim
Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must
have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.
A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when
the near arrival of G.D. was announced by no equivocal indications.
From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver
ghosts-poet, or historian--of Grecian or of Roman lore--to crown with
unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied
scholiast. Him Markland expected--him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter--him
the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon
earth[1], with newest airs prepared to greet ----; and, patron of
the gentle Christ's boy,--who should have been his patron through
life--the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from
his venerable Æsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the
matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself
upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered.
[Footnote 1: Graium _tantum vidit_.]