CHAPTER XXXII.

A Spot to be Buried in

CHAPTER THE LAST

The Conclusion of this Tale

THE IDEAL WORLD

I.

THE IDEAL WORLD,--ITS REALM IS EVERYWHERE AROUND US; ITS INHABITANTS ARE

THE IMMORTAL PERSONIFICATIONS OF ALL BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS; TO THAT WORLD WE

ATTAIN BY THE REPOSE OF THE SENSES.

AROUND “this visible diurnal sphere”

There floats a World that girds us like the space;

On wandering clouds and gliding beams career

Its ever-moving murmurous Populace.

There, all the lovelier thoughts conceived below

Ascending live, and in celestial shapes.

To that bright World, O Mortal, wouldst thou go?

Bind but thy senses, and thy soul escapes:

To care, to sin, to passion close thine eyes;

Sleep in the flesh, and see the Dreamland rise!

Hark to the gush of golden waterfalls,

Or knightly tromps at Archimagian Walls!

In the green hush of Dorian Valleys mark

The River Maid her amber tresses knitting;

When glow-worms twinkle under coverts dark,

And silver clouds o’er summer stars are flitting,

With jocund elves invade “the Moone’s sphere,

Or hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear;” *

Or, list! what time the roseate urns of dawn

Scatter fresh dews, and the first skylark weaves

Joy into song, the blithe Arcadian Faun

Piping to wood-nymphs under Bromian leaves,

While slowly gleaming through the purple glade

Come Evian’s panther car, and the pale Naxian Maid.

* “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Such, O Ideal World, thy habitants!

All the fair children of creative creeds,

All the lost tribes of Fantasy are thine,--

From antique Saturn in Dodonian haunts,

Or Pan’s first music waked from shepherd reeds,

To the last sprite when Heaven’s pale lamps decline,

Heard wailing soft along the solemn Rhine.

II.

OUR DREAMS BELONG TO THE IDEAL.--THE DIVINER LOVE FOR WHICH YOUTH SIGHS

NOT ATTAINABLE IN LIFE, BUT THE PURSUIT OF THAT LOVE BEYOND THE WORLD OF

THE SENSES PURIFIES THE SOUL AND AWAKES THE GENIUS.--PETRARCH.--DANTE.

Thine are the Dreams that pass the Ivory Gates,

With prophet shadows haunting poet eyes!

Thine the belov’d illusions youth creates

From the dim haze of its own happy skies.

In vain we pine; we yearn on earth to win

The being of the heart, our boyhood’s dream.

The Psyche and the Eros ne’er have been,

Save in Olympus, wedded! As a stream

Glasses a star, so life the ideal love;

Restless the stream below, serene the orb above!

Ever the soul the senses shall deceive;

Here custom chill, there kinder fate bereave:

For mortal lips unmeet eternal vows!

And Eden’s flowers for Adam’s mournful brows!

We seek to make the moment’s angel guest

The household dweller at a human hearth;

We chase the bird of Paradise, whose nest

Was never found amid the bowers of earth.*

* According to a belief in the East, which is associated with one

of the loveliest and most familiar of Oriental superstitions,

the bird of Paradise is never seen to rest upon the earth, and

its nest is never to be found.

Yet loftier joys the vain pursuit may bring,

Than sate the senses with the boons of time;

The bird of Heaven hath still an upward wing,

The steps it lures are still the steps that climb;

And in the ascent although the soil be bare,

More clear the daylight and more pure the air.

Let Petrarch’s heart the human mistress lose,

He mourns the Laura but to win the Muse.

Could all the charms which Georgian maids combine

Delight the soul of the dark Florentine,

Like one chaste dream of childlike Beatrice

Awaiting Hell’s dark pilgrim in the skies,

Snatched from below to be the guide above,

And clothe Religion in the form of Love?*

* It is supposed by many of the commentators on Dante, that in

the form of his lost Beatrice, who guides him in his Vision

of Heaven, he allegorizes Religious Faith.

III.

GENIUS, LIFTING ITS LIFE TO THE IDEAL, BECOMES ITSELF A PURE IDEA: IT

MUST COMPREHEND ALL EXISTENCE, ALL HUMAN SINS AND SUFFERINGS; BUT IN

COMPREHENDING, IT TRANSMUTES THEM.--THE POET IN HIS TWO-FOLD BEING,--THE

ACTUAL AND THE IDEAL.--THE INFLUENCE OF GENIUS OVER THE STERNEST

REALITIES OF EARTH; OVER OUR PASSIONS; WARS AND SUPERSTITIONS.--ITS

IDENTITY IS WITH HUMAN PROGRESS.--ITS AGENCY, EVEN WHERE UNACKNOWLEDGED,

IS UNIVERSAL.

Oh, thou true Iris! sporting on thy bow

Of tears and smiles! Jove’s herald, Poetry,

Thou reflex image of all joy and woe,

_Both_ fused in light by thy dear fantasy!

Lo! from the clay how Genius lifts its life,

And grows one pure Idea, one calm soul!

True, its own clearness must reflect our strife;

True, its completeness must comprise our whole;

But as the sun transmutes the sullen hues

Of marsh-grown vapours into vermeil dyes,

And melts them later into twilight dews,

Shedding on flowers the baptism of the skies;

So glows the Ideal in the air we breathe,

So from the fumes of sorrow and of sin,

Doth its warm light in rosy colours wreathe

Its playful cloudland, storing balms within.

Survey the Poet in his mortal mould,

Man, amongst men, descended from his throne!

The moth that chased the star now frets the fold,

Our cares, our faults, our follies are his own.

Passions as idle, and desires as vain,

Vex the wild heart, and dupe the erring brain.

From Freedom’s field the recreant Horace flies

To kiss the hand by which his country dies;

From Mary’s grave the mighty Peasant turns,

And hoarse with orgies rings the laugh of Burns.

While Rousseau’s lips a lackey’s vices own,--

Lips that could draw the thunder on a throne!

But when from Life the Actual GENIUS springs,

When, self-transformed by its own magic rod,

It snaps the fetters and expands the wings,

And drops the fleshly garb that veiled the god,

How the mists vanish as the form ascends!

How in its aureole every sunbeam blends!

By the Arch-Brightener of Creation seen,

How dim the crowns on perishable brows!

The snows of Atlas melt beneath the sheen,

Through Thebaid caves the rushing splendour flows.

Cimmerian glooms with Asian beams are bright,

And Earth reposes in a belt of light.

Now stern as Vengeance shines the awful form,

Armed with the bolt and glowing through the storm;

Sets the great deeps of human passion free,

And whelms the bulwarks that would breast the sea.

Roused by its voice the ghastly Wars arise,

Mars reddens earth, the Valkyrs pale the skies;

Dim Superstition from her hell escapes,

With all her shadowy brood of monster shapes;

Here life itself the scowl of Typhon* takes;

There Conscience shudders at Alecto’s snakes;

From Gothic graves at midnight yawning wide,

In gory cerements gibbering spectres glide;

And where o’er blasted heaths the lightnings flame,

Black secret hags “do deeds without a name!”

Yet through its direst agencies of awe,

Light marks its presence and pervades its law,

And, like Orion when the storms are loud,

It links creation while it gilds a cloud.

By ruthless Thor, free Thought, frank Honour stand,

Fame’s grand desire, and zeal for Fatherland.

The grim Religion of Barbarian Fear

With some Hereafter still connects the Here,

Lifts the gross sense to some spiritual source,

And thrones some Jove above the Titan Force,

Till, love completing what in awe began,

From the rude savage dawns the thoughtful man.

* The gloomy Typhon of Egypt assumes many of the mystic attributes

of the Principle of Life which, in the Grecian Apotheosis of the

Indian Bacchus, is represented in so genial a character of

exuberant joy and everlasting youth.

Then, oh, behold the Glorious comforter!

Still bright’ning worlds but gladd’ning now the hearth,

Or like the lustre of our nearest star,

Fused in the common atmosphere of earth.

It sports like hope upon the captive’s chain;

Descends in dreams upon the couch of pain;

To wonder’s realm allures the earnest child;

To the chaste love refines the instinct wild;

And as in waters the reflected beam,

Still where we turn, glides with us up the stream,

And while in truth the whole expanse is bright,

Yields to each eye its own fond path of light,--

So over life the rays of Genius fall,

Give each his track because illuming all.

IV.

FORGIVENESS TO THE ERRORS OF OUR BENEFACTORS.

Hence is that secret pardon we bestow

In the true instinct of the grateful heart,

Upon the Sons of Song. The good they do

In the clear world of their Uranian art

Endures forever; while the evil done

In the poor drama of their mortal scene,

Is but a passing cloud before the sun;

Space hath no record where the mist hath been.

Boots it to us if Shakspeare erred like man?

Why idly question that most mystic life?

Eno’ the giver in his gifts to scan;

To bless the sheaves with which thy fields are rife,

Nor, blundering, guess through what obstructive clay

The glorious corn-seed struggled up to day.

V.

THE IDEAL IS NOT CONFINED TO POETS.--ALGERNON SIDNEY RECOGNIZES HIS IDEAL

IN LIBERTY, AND BELIEVES IN ITS TRIUMPH WHERE THE MERE PRACTICAL MAN

COULD BEHOLD BUT ITS RUINS; YET LIBERTY IN THIS WORLD MUST EVER BE AN

IDEAL, AND THE LAND THAT IT PROMISES CAN BE FOUND BUT IN DEATH.

But not to you alone, O Sons Of Song,

The wings that float the loftier airs along.

Whoever lifts us from the dust we are,

Beyond the sensual to spiritual goals;

Who from the MOMENT and the SELF afar

By deathless deeds allures reluctant souls,

Gives the warm life to what the Limner draws,--

Plato but thought what godlike Cato was.*

Recall the Wars of England’s giant-born,

Is Elyot’s voice, is Hampden’s death in vain?

Have all the meteors of the vernal morn

But wasted light upon a frozen main?

Where is that child of Carnage, Freedom, flown?

The Sybarite lolls upon the martyr’s throne.

Lewd, ribald jests succeed to solemn zeal;

And things of silk to Cromwell’s men of steel.

Cold are the hosts the tromps of Ireton thrilled,

And hushed the senates Vane’s large presence filled.

In what strong heart doth the old manhood dwell?

Where art thou, Freedom? Look! in Sidney’s cell!

There still as stately stands the living Truth,

Smiling on age as it had smiled on youth.

Her forts dismantled, and her shrines o’erthrown,

The headsman’s block her last dread altar-stone,

No sanction left to Reason’s vulgar hope,

Far from the wrecks expands her prophet’s scope.

Millennial morns the tombs of Kedron gild,

The hands of saints the glorious walls rebuild,--

Till each foundation garnished with its gem,

High o’er Gehenna flames Jerusalem!

O thou blood-stained Ideal of the free,

Whose breath is heard in clarions,--Liberty!

Sublimer for thy grand illusions past,

Thou spring’st to Heaven,--Religion at the last.

Alike below, or commonwealths or thrones,

Where’er men gather some crushed victim groans;

Only in death thy real form we see,

All life is bondage,--souls alone are free.

Thus through the waste the wandering Hebrews went,

Fire on the march, but cloud upon the tent.

At last on Pisgah see the prophet stand,

Before his vision spreads the PROMISED LAND;

But where revealed the Canaan to his eye?--

Upon the mountain he ascends to die.

* What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was.--POPE.

VI.

YET ALL HAVE TWO ESCAPES INTO THE IDEAL WORLD; NAMELY, MEMORY AND

HOPE.--EXAMPLE OF HOPE IN YOUTH, HOWEVER EXCLUDED FROM ACTION AND

DESIRE.--NAPOLEON’S SON.

Yet whatsoever be our bondage here,

All have two portals to the phantom sphere.

What hath not glided through those gates that ope

Beyond the Hour, to MEMORY or to HOPE!

Give Youth the Garden,--still it soars above,

Seeks some far glory, some diviner love.

Place Age amidst the Golgotha,--its eyes

Still quit the graves, to rest upon the skies;

And while the dust, unheeded, moulders there,

Track some lost angel through cerulean air.

Lo! where the Austrian binds, with formal chain,

The crownless son of earth’s last Charlemagne,--

Him, at whose birth laughed all the violet vales

(While yet unfallen stood thy sovereign star,

O Lucifer of nations). Hark, the gales

Swell with the shout from all the hosts, whose war

Rended the Alps, and crimsoned Memphian Nile,--

“Way for the coming of the Conqueror’s Son:

Woe to the Merchant-Carthage of the Isle!

Woe to the Scythian ice-world of the Don!

O Thunder Lord, thy Lemnian bolts prepare,

The Eagle’s eyry hath its eagle heir!”

Hark, at that shout from north to south, gray Power

Quails on its weak, hereditary thrones;

And widowed mothers prophesy the hour

Of future carnage to their cradled sons.

What! shall our race to blood be thus consigned,

And Ate claim an heirloom in mankind?

Are these red lots unshaken in the urn?

Years pass; approach, pale Questioner, and learn

Chained to his rock, with brows that vainly frown,

The fallen Titan sinks in darkness down!

And sadly gazing through his gilded grate,

Behold the child whose birth was as a fate!

Far from the land in which his life began;

Walled from the healthful air of hardy man;

Reared by cold hearts, and watched by jealous eyes,

His guardians jailers, and his comrades spies.

Each trite convention courtly fears inspire

To stint experience and to dwarf desire;

Narrows the action to a puppet stage,

And trains the eaglet to the starling’s cage.

On the dejected brow and smileless cheek,

What weary thought the languid lines bespeak;

Till drop by drop, from jaded day to day,

The sickly life-streams ooze themselves away.

Yet oft in HOPE a boundless realm was thine,

That vaguest Infinite,--the Dream of Fame;

Son of the sword that first made kings divine,

Heir to man’s grandest royalty,--a Name!

Then didst thou burst upon the startled world,

And keep the glorious promise of thy birth;

Then were the wings that bear the bolt unfurled,

A monarch’s voice cried, “Place upon the earth!”

A new Philippi gained a second Rome,

And the Son’s sword avenged the greater Caesar’s doom.

VII.

EXAMPLE OF MEMORY AS LEADING TO THE IDEAL,--AMIDST LIFE HOWEVER HUMBLE,

AND IN A MIND HOWEVER IGNORANT.--THE VILLAGE WIDOW.

But turn the eye to life’s sequestered vale

And lowly roofs remote in hamlets green.

Oft in my boyhood where the moss-grown pale

Fenced quiet graves, a female form was seen;

Each eve she sought the melancholy ground,

And lingering paused, and wistful looked around.

If yet some footstep rustled through the grass,

Timorous she shrunk, and watched the shadow pass;

Then, when the spot lay lone amidst the gloom,

Crept to one grave too humble for a tomb,

There silent bowed her face above the dead,

For, if in prayer, the prayer was inly said;

Still as the moonbeam, paused her quiet shade,

Still as the moonbeam, through the yews to fade.

Whose dust thus hallowed by so fond a care?

What the grave saith not, let the heart declare.

On yonder green two orphan children played;

By yonder rill two plighted lovers strayed;

In yonder shrine two lives were blent in one,

And joy-bells chimed beneath a summer sun.

Poor was their lot, their bread in labour found;

No parent blessed them, and no kindred owned;

They smiled to hear the wise their choice condemn;

They loved--they loved--and love was wealth to them!

Hark--one short week--again the holy bell!

Still shone the sun; but dirge like boomed the knell,--

The icy hand had severed breast from breast;

Left life to toil, and summoned Death to rest.

Full fifty years since then have passed away,

Her cheek is furrowed, and her hair is gray.

Yet, when she speaks of _him_ (the times are rare),

Hear in her voice how youth still trembles there.

The very name of that young life that died

Still heaves the bosom, and recalls the bride.

Lone o’er the widow’s hearth those years have fled,

The daily toil still wins the daily bread;

No books deck sorrow with fantastic dyes;

Her fond romance her woman heart supplies;

And, haply in the few still moments given,

(Day’s taskwork done), to memory, death, and heaven,

To that unuttered poem may belong

Thoughts of such pathos as had beggared song.

VIII.

HENCE IN HOPE, MEMORY, AND PRAYER, ALL OF US ARE POETS.

Yes, while thou hopest, music fills the air,

While thou rememberest, life reclothes the clod;

While thou canst feel the electric chain of prayer,

Breathe but a thought, and be a soul with God!

Let not these forms of matter bound thine eye.

He who the vanishing point of Human things

Lifts from the landscape, lost amidst the sky,

Has found the Ideal which the poet sings,

Has pierced the pall around the senses thrown,

And is himself a poet, though unknown.

IX.

APPLICATION OF THE POEM TO THE TALE TO WHICH IT IS PREFIXED.--THE

RHINE,--ITS IDEAL CHARACTER IN ITS HISTORICAL AND LEGENDARY ASSOCIATIONS.

Eno’!--my song is closing, and to thee,

Land of the North, I dedicate its lay;

As I have done the simple tale to be

The drama of this prelude!

Faraway

Rolls the swift Rhine beneath the starry ray;

But to my ear its haunted waters sigh;

Its moonlight mountains glimmer on my eye;

On wave, on marge, as on a wizard’s glass,

Imperial ghosts in dim procession pass;

Lords of the wild, the first great Father-men,

Their fane the hill-top, and their home the glen;

Frowning they fade; a bridge of steel appears

With frank-eyed Caesar smiling through the spears;

The march moves onwards, and the mirror brings

The Gothic crowns of Carlovingian kings

Vanished alike! The Hermit rears his Cross,

And barbs neigh shrill, and plumes in tumult toss,

While (knighthood’s sole sweet conquest from the Moor)

Sings to Arabian lutes the Tourbadour.

Not yet, not yet; still glide some lingering shades,

Still breathe some murmurs as the starlight fades,

Still from her rock I hear the Siren call,

And see the tender ghost in Roland’s mouldering hall!

X.

APPLICATION OF THE POEM CONTINUED.--THE IDEAL LENDS ITS AID TO THE MOST

FAMILIAR AND THE MOST ACTUAL SORROW OF LIFE.--FICTION COMPARED TO

SLEEP,--IT STRENGTHENS WHILE IT SOOTHES.

Trite were the tale I tell of love and doom,

(Whose life hath loved not, whose not mourned a tomb?)

But fiction draws a poetry from grief,

As art its healing from the withered leaf.

Play thou, sweet Fancy, round the sombre truth,

Crown the sad Genius ere it lower the torch!

When death the altar and the victim youth,

Flutes fill the air, and garlands deck the porch.

As down the river drifts the Pilgrim sail,

Clothe the rude hill-tops, lull the Northern gale;

With childlike lore the fatal course beguile,

And brighten death with Love’s untiring smile.

Along the banks let fairy forms be seen

“By fountain clear, or spangled starlike sheen.” *

Let sound and shape to which the sense is dull

Haunt the soul opening on the Beautiful.

And when at length, the symbol voyage done,

Surviving Grief shrinks lonely from the sun,

By tender types show Grief what memories bloom

From lost delight, what fairies guard the tomb.

Scorn not the dream, O world-worn; pause a while,

New strength shall nerve thee as the dreams beguile,

Stung by the rest, less far shall seem the goal!

As sleep to life, so fiction to the soul.

* “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE

CHAPTER I. IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO QUEEN NYMPHALIN.

IN one of those green woods which belong so peculiarly to our island

(for the Continent has its forests, but England its woods) there lived,

a short time ago, a charming little fairy called Nymphalin. I believe

she is descended from a younger branch of the house of Mab; but perhaps

that may only be a genealogical fable, for your fairies are very

susceptible to the pride of ancestry, and it is impossible to deny that

they fall somewhat reluctantly into the liberal opinions so much in

vogue at the present day.

However that may be, it is quite certain that all the courtiers in

Nymphalin’s domain (for she was a queen fairy) made a point of asserting

her right to this illustrious descent; and accordingly she quartered the

Mab arms with her own,--three acorns vert, with a grasshopper rampant.

It was as merry a little court as could possibly be conceived, and on

a fine midsummer night it would have been worth while attending the

queen’s balls; that is to say, if you could have got a ticket, a favour

not obtained without great interest.

But, unhappily, until both men and fairies adopt Mr. Owen’s proposition,

and live in parallelograms, they will always be the victims of _ennui_.

And Nymphalin, who had been disappointed in love, and was still

unmarried, had for the last five or six months been exceedingly tired

even of giving balls. She yawned very frequently, and consequently

yawning became a fashion.

“But why don’t we have some new dances, my Pipalee?” said Nymphalin to

her favourite maid of honour; “these waltzes are very old-fashioned.”

“Very old-fashioned,” said Pipalee.

The queen gaped, and Pipalee did the same.

It was a gala night; the court was held in a lone and beautiful hollow,

with the wild brake closing round it on every side, so that no human

step could easily gain the spot. Wherever the shadows fell upon the

brake a glow-worm made a point of exhibiting itself, and the bright

August moon sailed slowly above, pleased to look down upon so charming

a scene of merriment; for they wrong the moon who assert that she has

an objection to mirth,--with the mirth of fairies she has all possible

sympathy. Here and there in the thicket the scarce honeysuckles--in

August honeysuckles are somewhat out of season--hung their rich

festoons, and at that moment they were crowded with the elderly fairies,

who had given up dancing and taken to scandal. Besides the honeysuckle

you might see the hawkweed and the white convolvulus, varying the soft

verdure of the thicket; and mushrooms in abundance had sprung up in

the circle, glittering in the silver moonlight, and acceptable beyond

measure to the dancers: every one knows how agreeable a thing tents are

in a _fete champetre_! I was mistaken in saying that the brake closed

the circle entirely round; for there was one gap, scarcely apparent to

mortals, through which a fairy at least might catch a view of a

brook that was close at hand, rippling in the stars, and checkered at

intervals by the rich weeds floating on the surface, interspersed

with the delicate arrowhead and the silver water-lily. Then the trees

themselves, in their prodigal variety of hues,--the blue, the purple,

the yellowing tint, the tender and silvery verdure, and the deep mass

of shade frowning into black; the willow, the elm, the ash, the fir, and

the lime, “and, best of all, Old England’s haunted oak;” these hues were

broken again into a thousand minor and subtler shades as the twinkling

stars pierced the foliage, or the moon slept with a richer light upon

some favoured glade.

It was a gala night; the elderly fairies, as I said before, were

chatting among the honeysuckles; the young were flirting, and dancing,

and making love; the middle-aged talked politics under the mushrooms;

and the queen herself and half-a-dozen of her favourites were yawning

their pleasure from a little mound covered with the thickest moss.

“It has been very dull, madam, ever since Prince Fayzenheim left us,”

said the fairy Nip.

The queen sighed.

“How handsome the prince is!” said Pipalee.

The queen blushed.

“He wore the prettiest dress in the world; and what a mustache!” cried

Pipalee, fanning herself with her left wing.

“He was a coxcomb,” said the lord treasurer, sourly. The lord treasurer

was the honestest and most disagreeable fairy at court; he was an

admirable husband, brother, son, cousin, uncle, and godfather,--it was

these virtues that had made him a lord treasurer. Unfortunately they

had not made him a sensible fairy. He was like Charles the Second in

one respect, for he never did a wise thing; but he was not like him in

another, for he very often said a foolish one.

The queen frowned.

“A young prince is not the worse for that,” retorted Pipalee. “Heigho!

does your Majesty think his Highness likely to return?”

“Don’t tease me,” said Nymphalin, pettishly.

The lord treasurer, by way of giving the conversation an agreeable

turn, reminded her Majesty that there was a prodigious accumulation

of business to see to, especially that difficult affair about the

emmet-wasp loan. Her Majesty rose; and leaning on Pipalee’s arm, walked

down to the supper tent.

“Pray,” said the fairy Trip to the fairy Nip, “what is all this talk

about Prince Fayzenheim? Excuse my ignorance; I am only just out, you

know.”

“Why,” answered Nip, a young courtier, not a marrying fairy, but very

seductive, “the story runs thus: Last summer a foreigner visited us,

calling himself Prince Fayzenheim: one of your German fairies, I fancy;

no great things, but an excellent waltzer. He wore long spurs, made out

of the stings of the horse-flies in the Black Forest; his cap sat on one

side, and his mustachios curled like the lip of the dragon-flower. He

was on his travels, and amused himself by making love to the queen. You

can’t fancy, dear Trip, how fond she was of hearing him tell stories

about the strange creatures of Germany,--about wild huntsmen,

water-sprites, and a pack of such stuff,” added Nip, contemptuously, for

Nip was a freethinker.

“In short?” said Trip.

“In short, she loved,” cried Nip, with a theatrical air.

“And the prince?”

“Packed up his clothes, and sent on his travelling-carriage, in order

that he might go at his ease on the top of a stage-pigeon; in short--as

you say--in short, he deserted the queen, and ever since she has set the

fashion of yawning.”

“It was very naughty in him,” said the gentle Trip.

“Ah, my dear creature,” cried Nip, “if it had been you to whom he had

paid his addresses!”

Trip simpered, and the old fairies from their seats in the honeysuckles

observed she was “sadly conducted;” but the Trips had never been too

respectable.

Meanwhile the queen, leaning on Pipalee, said, after a short pause, “Do

you know I have formed a plan!”

“How delightful!” cried Pipalee. “Another gala!”

“Pooh, surely even you must be tired with such levities: the spirit of

the age is no longer frivolous; and I dare say as the march of gravity

proceeds, we shall get rid of galas altogether.” The queen said this

with an air of inconceivable wisdom, for the “Society for the Diffusion

of General Stupefaction” had been recently established among the

fairies, and its tracts had driven all the light reading out of the

market. “The Penny Proser” had contributed greatly to the increase of

knowledge and yawning, so visibly progressive among the courtiers.

“No,” continued Nymphalin; “I have thought of something better than

galas. Let us travel!”

Pipalee clasped her hands in ecstasy.

“Where shall we travel?”

“Let us go up the Rhine,” said the queen, turning away her head. “We

shall be amazingly welcomed; there are fairies without number all the

way by its banks, and various distant connections of ours whose nature

and properties will afford interest and instruction to a philosophical

mind.”

“Number Nip, for instance,” cried the gay Pipalee.

“The Red Man!” said the graver Nymphalin.

“Oh, my queen, what an excellent scheme!” and Pipalee was so lively

during the rest of the night that the old fairies in the honeysuckle

insinuated that the lady of honour had drunk a buttercup too much of the

Maydew.

CHAPTER II. THE LOVERS.

I WISH only for such readers as give themselves heart and soul up to

me,--if they begin to cavil I have done with them; their fancy should

put itself entirely under my management; and, after all, ought they not

to be too glad to get out of this hackneyed and melancholy world, to be

run away with by an author who promises them something new?

From the heights of Bruges, a Mortal and his betrothed gazed upon the

scene below. They saw the sun set slowly amongst purple masses of cloud,

and the lover turned to his mistress and sighed deeply; for her cheek

was delicate in its blended roses, beyond the beauty that belongs to

the hues of health; and when he saw the sun sinking from the world, the

thought came upon him that _she_ was his sun, and the glory that

she shed over his life might soon pass away into the bosom of the

“ever-during Dark.” But against the clouds rose one of the many spires

that characterize the town of Bruges; and on that spire, tapering into

heaven, rested the eyes of Gertrude Vane. The different objects that

caught the gaze of each was emblematic both of the different channel of

their thoughts and the different elements of their nature: he thought of

the sorrow, she of the consolation; his heart prophesied of the passing

away from earth, hers of the ascension into heaven. The lower part of

the landscape was wrapped in shade; but just where the bank curved round

in a mimic bay, the waters caught the sun’s parting smile, and rippled

against the herbage that clothed the shore, with a scarcely noticeable

wave. There are two of the numerous mills which are so picturesque a

feature of that country, standing at a distance from each other on the

rising banks, their sails perfectly still in the cool silence of the

evening, and adding to the rustic tranquillity which breathed around.

For to me there is something in the still sails of one of those

inventions of man’s industry peculiarly eloquent of repose: the rest

seems typical of the repose of our own passions, short and uncertain,

contrary to their natural ordination; and doubly impressive from the

feeling which admonishes us how precarious is the stillness, how utterly

dependent on every wind rising at any moment and from any quarter of

the heavens! They saw before them no living forms, save of one or two

peasants yet lingering by the water-side.

Trevylyan drew closer to his Gertrude; for his love was inexpressibly

tender, and his vigilant anxiety for her made his stern frame feel the

first coolness of the evening even before she felt it herself.

“Dearest, let me draw your mantle closer round you.”

Gertrude smiled her thanks.

“I feel better than I have done for weeks,” said she; “and when once we

get into the Rhine, you will see me grow so strong as to shock all your

interest for me.”

“Ah, would to Heaven my interest for you may be put to such an ordeal!”

said Trevylyan; and they turned slowly to the inn, where Gertrude’s

father already awaited them.

Trevylyan was of a wild, a resolute, and an active nature. Thrown on

the world at the age of sixteen, he had passed his youth in alternate

pleasure, travel, and solitary study. At the age in which manhood is

least susceptible to caprice, and most perhaps to passion, he fell in

love with the loveliest person that ever dawned upon a poet’s vision.

I say this without exaggeration, for Gertrude Vane’s was indeed

the beauty, but the perishable beauty, of a dream. It happened most

singularly to Trevylyan (but he was a singular man), that being

naturally one whose affections it was very difficult to excite, he

should have fallen in love at first sight with a person whose disease,

already declared, would have deterred any other heart from risking

its treasures on a bark so utterly unfitted for the voyage of life.

Consumption, but consumption in its most beautiful shape, had set its

seal upon Gertrude Vane, when Trevylyan first saw her, and at once

loved. He knew the danger of the disease; he did not, except at

intervals, deceive himself; he wrestled against the new passion: but,

stern as his nature was, he could not conquer it. He loved, he confessed

his love, and Gertrude returned it.

In a love like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,--it is

essentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear,

and, scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel of

the senses, breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those lofty

aspirations, which pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is

“the desire of the moth for the star;” it is the love of the soul!

Gertrude was advised by the faculty to try a southern climate; but

Gertrude was the daughter of a German mother, and her young fancy had

been nursed in all the wild legends and the alluring visions that

belong to the children of the Rhine. Her imagination, more romantic than

classic, yearned for the vine-clad hills and haunted forests which are

so fertile in their spells to those who have once drunk, even sparingly,

of the Literature of the North. Her desire strongly expressed, her

declared conviction that if any change of scene could yet arrest the

progress of her malady it would be the shores of the river she had so

longed to visit, prevailed with her physicians and her father, and they

consented to that pilgrimage along the Rhine on which Gertrude, her

father, and her lover were now bound.

It was by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from the

heights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining on

the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks

of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer

(for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling

_cortege_), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little

elf, had gone round the town to reconnoitre.

“Bless me!” said the lord treasurer; “what a mad freak is this! Crossing

that immense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this?

One may see that the fairies thrive ill here.”

“You are always discontented, my lord,” said Pipalee; “but then you are

somewhat too old to travel,--at least, unless you go in your nutshell

and four.”

The lord treasurer did not like this remark, so he muttered a peevish

pshaw, and took a pinch of honeysuckle dust to console himself for being

forced to put up with so much frivolity.

At this moment, ere the moon was yet at her middest height, Nymphalin

joined her subjects.

“I have just returned,” said she, with a melancholy expression on her

countenance, “from a scene that has almost renewed in me that

sympathy with human beings which of late years our race has well-nigh

relinquished.

“I hurried through the town without noticing much food for adventure.

I paused for a moment on a fat citizen’s pillow, and bade him dream of

love. He woke in a fright, and ran down to see that his cheeses

were safe. I swept with a light wing over a politician’s eyes, and

straightway he dreamed of theatres and music. I caught an undertaker in

his first nap, and I have left him whirled into a waltz. For what would

be sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber,

in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer,

and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was

on the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel of

Purity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holy

thoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,--of a

happy home, of the kisses of her young lover, of eternal faith, and

unwaning tenderness. Let her at least enjoy in dreams what Fate

has refused to Truth! And, passing from the room, I found her lover

stretched in his cloak beside the door; for he reads with a feverish and

desperate prophecy the doom that waits her; and so loves he the very

air she breathes, the very ground she treads, that when she has left

his sight he creeps, silently and unknown to her, to the nearest spot

hallowed by her presence, anxious that while yet she is on earth not an

hour, not a moment, should be wasted upon other thoughts than those that

belong to her; and feeling a security, a fearful joy, in lessening the

distance that _now_ only momentarily divides them. And that love seemed

to me not as the love of the common world, and I stayed my wings

and looked upon it as a thing that centuries might pass and bring no

parallel to, in its beauty and its melancholy truth. But I kept away the

sleep from the lover’s eyes, for well I knew that sleep was a tyrant,

that shortened the brief time of waking tenderness for the living, yet

spared him; and one sad, anxious thought of her was sweeter, in spite of

its sorrow, than the brightest of fairy dreams. So I left him awake,

and watching there through the long night, and felt that the children

of earth have still something that unites them to the spirits of a finer

race, so long as they retain amongst them the presence of real love!”

And oh! is there not a truth also in our fictions of the Unseen World?

Are there not yet bright lingerers by the forest and the stream? Do the

moon and the soft stars look out on no delicate and winged forms bathing

in their light? Are the fairies and the invisible hosts but the children

of our dreams, and not their inspiration? Is that all a delusion which

speaks from the golden page? And is the world only given to harsh and

anxious travellers that walk to and fro in pursuit of no gentle shadows?

Are the chimeras of the passions the sole spirits of the universe? No!

while my remembrance treasures in its deepest cell the image of one no

more,--one who was “not of the earth, earthy;” one in whom love was the

essence of thoughts divine; one whose shape and mould, whose heart and

genius, would, had Poesy never before dreamed it, have called forth

the first notion of spirits resembling mortals, but not of them,--no,

Gertrude! while I remember you, the faith, the trust in brighter shapes

and fairer natures than the world knows of, comes clinging to my heart;

and still will I think that Fairies might have watched over your sleep

and Spirits have ministered to your dreams.

CHAPTER III. FEELINGS.

GERTRUDE and her companions proceeded by slow and, to her, delightful

stages to Rotterdam. Trevylyan sat by her side, and her hand was ever

in his; and when her delicate frame became sensible of fatigue, her head

drooped on his shoulder as its natural resting-place. Her father was

a man who had lived long enough to have encountered many reverses of

fortune, and they had left him, as I am apt to believe long adversity

usually does leave its prey, somewhat chilled and somewhat hardened to

affection; passive and quiet of hope, resigned to the worst as to

the common order of events, and expecting little from the best, as an

unlooked-for incident in the regularity of human afflictions. He was

insensible of his daughter’s danger, for he was not one whom the fear

of love endows with prophetic vision; and he lived tranquilly in the

present, without asking what new misfortune awaited him in the future.

Yet he loved his child, his only child, with whatever of affection

was left him by the many shocks his heart had received; and in her

approaching connection with one rich and noble as Trevylyan, he

felt even something bordering upon pleasure. Lapped in the apathetic

indifference of his nature, he leaned back in the carriage, enjoying the

bright weather that attended their journey, and sensible--for he was one

of fine and cultivated taste--of whatever beauties of nature or remains

of art varied their course. A companion of this sort was the most

agreeable that two persons never needing a third could desire; he left

them undisturbed to the intoxication of their mutual presence; he marked

not the interchange of glances; he listened not to the whisper, the low

delicious whisper, with which the heart speaks its sympathy to heart. He

broke not that charmed silence which falls over us when the thoughts are

full, and words leave nothing to explain; that repose of feeling; that

certainty that we are understood without the effort of words, which

makes the real luxury of intercourse and the true enchantment of travel.

What a memory hours like these bequeath, after we have settled down into

the calm occupation of common life! How beautiful, through the vista of

years, seems that brief moonlight track upon the waters of our youth!

And Trevylyan’s nature, which, as I have said before, was naturally

hard and stern, which was hot, irritable, ambitious, and prematurely

tinctured with the policy and lessons of the world, seemed utterly

changed by the peculiarities of his love. Every hour, every moment was

full of incident to him; every look of Gertrude’s was entered in the

tablets of his heart; so that his love knew no languor, it required no

change: he was absorbed in it,--_it was himself_! And he was soft, and

watchful as the step of a mother by the couch of her sick child;

the lion within him was tamed by indomitable love; the sadness, the

presentiment, that was mixed with all his passion for Gertrude, filled

him too with that poetry of feeling which is the result of thoughts

weighing upon us, and not to be expressed by ordinary language. In this

part of their journey, as I find by the date, were the following lines

written; they are to be judged as the lines of one in whom emotion and

truth were the only inspiration:--

I. As leaves left darkling in the flush of day,

When glints the glad sun checkering o’er the tree,

I see the green earth brightening in the ray,

Which only casts a shadow upon me!

II. What are the beams, the flowers, the glory, all

Life’s glow and gloss, the music and the bloom,

When every sun but speeds the Eternal Pall,

And Time is Death that dallies with the Tomb?

III. And yet--oh yet, so young, so pure!--the while

Fresh laugh the rose-hues round youth’s morning sky,

That voice, those eyes, the deep love of that smile,

Are they not soul--_all_ soul--and _can_ they die?

IV. Are there the words “NO MORE” for thoughts like ours?

Must the bark sink upon so soft a wave?

Hath the short summer of thy life no flowers

But those which bloom above thine early grave?

V. O God! and what is life, that I should live?

(Hath not the world enow of common clay?)

And she--the Rose--whose life a soul could give

To the void desert, sigh its sweets away?

VI. And I that love thee thus, to whom the air,

Blest by thy breath, makes heaven where’er it be,

Watch thy cheek wane, and smile away despair,

Lest it should dim one hour yet left to Thee.

VII. Still let me conquer self; oh, still conceal

By the smooth brow the snake that coils below;

Break, break my heart! it comforts yet to feel

That _she_ dreams on, unwakened by my woe!

VIII. Hushed, where the Star’s soft angel loves to keep

Watch o’er their tide, the morning waters roll;

So glides my spirit,--darkness in the deep,

But o’er the wave the presence of thy soul!

Gertrude had not as yet the presentiments that filled the soul of

Trevylyan. She thought too little of herself to know her danger, and

those hours to her were hours of unmingled sweetness. Sometimes, indeed,

the exhaustion of her disease tinged her spirits with a vague sadness,

an abstraction came over her, and a languor she vainly struggled

against. These fits of dejection and gloom touched Trevylyan to the

quick; his eye never ceased to watch them, nor his heart to soothe.

Often when he marked them, he sought to attract her attention from what

he fancied, though erringly, a sympathy with his own forebodings, and

to lead her young and romantic imagination through the temporary

beguilements of fiction; for Gertrude was yet in the first bloom of

youth, and all the dews of beautiful childhood sparkled freshly from the

virgin blossoms of her mind. And Trevylyan, who had passed some of his

early years among the students of Leipsic, and was deeply versed in the

various world of legendary lore, ransacked his memory for such tales

as seemed to him most likely to win her interest; and often with false

smiles entered into the playful tale, or oftener, with more faithful

interest, into the graver legend of trials that warned yet beguiled them

from their own. Of such tales I have selected but a few; I know not that

they are the least unworthy of repetition,--they are those which many

recollections induce me to repeat the most willingly. Gertrude loved

these stories, for she had not yet lost, by the coldness of the world,

one leaf from that soft and wild romance which belonged to her beautiful

mind; and, more than all, she loved the sound of a voice which every

day became more and more musical to her ear. “Shall I tell you,” said

Trevylyan, one morning, as he observed her gloomier mood stealing over

the face of Gertrude,--“shall I tell you, ere yet we pass into the dull

land of Holland, a story of Malines, whose spires we shall shortly

see?” Gertrude’s face brightened at once, and as she leaned back in the

carriage as it whirled rapidly along, and fixed her deep blue eyes on

Trevylyan, he began the following tale.

CHAPTER IV. THE MAID OF MALINES.

IT was noonday in the town of Malines, or Mechlin, as the English

usually term it; the Sabbath bell had summoned the inhabitants to

divine worship; and the crowd that had loitered round the Church of St.

Rembauld had gradually emptied itself within the spacious aisles of the

sacred edifice.

A young man was standing in the street, with his eyes bent on the

ground, and apparently listening for some sound; for without raising his

looks from the rude pavement, he turned to every corner of it with an

intent and anxious expression of countenance. He held in one hand a

staff, in the other a long slender cord, the end of which trailed on

the ground; every now and then he called, with a plaintive voice, “Fido,

Fido, come back! Why hast thou deserted me?” Fido returned not; the dog,

wearied of confinement, had slipped from the string, and was at play

with his kind in a distant quarter of the town, leaving the blind man to

seek his way as he might to his solitary inn.

By and by a light step passed through the street, and the young

stranger’s face brightened.

“Pardon me,” said he, turning to the spot where his quick ear had

caught the sound, “and direct me, if you are not much pressed for a few

moments’ time, to the hotel ‘Mortier d’Or.’”

It was a young woman, whose dress betokened that she belonged to the

middling class of life, whom he thus addressed. “It is some distance

hence, sir,” said she; “but if you continue your way straight on for

about a hundred yards, and then take the second turn to your right

hand--”

“Alas!” interrupted the stranger, with a melancholy smile, “your

direction will avail me little; my dog has deserted me, and I am blind!”

There was something in these words, and in the stranger’s voice, which

went irresistibly to the heart of the young woman. “Pray forgive me,”

she said, almost with tears in her eyes, “I did not perceive your--”

misfortune, she was about to say, but she checked herself with an

instinctive delicacy. “Lean upon me, I will conduct you to the door;

nay, sir,” observing that he hesitated, “I have time enough to spare, I

assure you.”

The stranger placed his hand on the young woman’s arm; and though

Lucille was naturally so bashful that even her mother would laughingly

reproach her for the excess of a maiden virtue, she felt not the least

pang of shame, as she found herself thus suddenly walking through the

streets of Malines along with a young stranger, whose dress and air

betokened him of rank superior to her own.

“Your voice is very gentle,” said he, after a pause; “and that,” he

added, with a slight sigh, “is the only criterion by which I know the

young and the beautiful!” Lucille now blushed, and with a slight mixture

of pain in the blush, for she knew well that to beauty she had no

pretension. “Are you a native of this town?” continued he.

“Yes, sir; my father holds a small office in the customs, and my mother

and I eke out his salary by making lace. We are called poor, but we do

not feel it, sir.”

“You are fortunate! there is no wealth like the heart’s

wealth,--content,” answered the blind man, mournfully.

“And, monsieur,” said Lucille, feeling angry with herself that she had

awakened a natural envy in the stranger’s mind, and anxious to change

the subject--“and, monsieur, has he been long at Malines?”

“But yesterday. I am passing through the Low Countries on a tour;

perhaps you smile at the tour of a blind man, but it is wearisome

even to the blind to rest always in the same place. I thought during

church-time, when the streets were empty, that I might, by the help of

my dog, enjoy safely at least the air, if not the sight of the town;

but there are some persons, methinks, who cannot have even a dog for a

friend!”

The blind man spoke bitterly,--the desertion of his dog had touched

him to the core. Lucille wiped her eyes. “And does Monsieur travel then

alone?” said she; and looking at his face more attentively than she had

yet ventured to do, she saw that he was scarcely above two-and-twenty.

“His father, and his _mother_,” she added, with an emphasis on the last

word, “are they not with him?”

“I am an orphan!” answered the stranger; “and I have neither brother nor

sister.”

The desolate condition of the blind man quite melted Lucille; never had

she been so strongly affected. She felt a strange flutter at the heart,

a secret and earnest sympathy, that attracted her at once towards him.

She wished that Heaven had suffered her to be his sister!

The contrast between the youth and the form of the stranger, and the

affliction which took hope from the one and activity from the other,

increased the compassion he excited. His features were remarkably

regular, and had a certain nobleness in their outline; and his frame

was gracefully and firmly knit, though he moved cautiously and with no

cheerful step.

They had now passed into a narrow street leading towards the hotel,

when they heard behind them the clatter of hoofs; and Lucille, looking

hastily back, saw that a troop of the Belgian horse was passing through

the town.

She drew her charge close by the wall, and trembling with fear for

him, she stationed herself by his side. The troop passed at a full trot

through the street; and at the sound of their clanging arms, and the

ringing hoofs of their heavy chargers, Lucille might have seen, had

she looked at the blind man’s face, that its sad features kindled

with enthusiasm, and his head was raised proudly from its wonted and

melancholy bend. “Thank Heaven!” she said, as the troop had nearly

passed them, “the danger is over!” Not so. One of the last two soldiers

who rode abreast was unfortunately mounted on a young and unmanageable

horse. The rider’s oaths and digging spur only increased the fire and

impatience of the charger; it plunged from side to side of the narrow

street.

“Look to yourselves!” cried the horseman, as he was borne on to the

place where Lucille and the stranger stood against the wall. “Are ye

mad? Why do you not run?”

“For Heaven’s sake, for mercy’s sake, he is blind!” cried Lucille,

clinging to the stranger’s side.

“Save yourself, my kind guide!” said the stranger. But Lucille dreamed

not of such desertion. The trooper wrested the horse’s head from the

spot where they stood; with a snort, as it felt the spur, the enraged

animal lashed out with its hind-legs; and Lucille, unable to save

_both_, threw herself before the blind man, and received the shock

directed against him; her slight and delicate arm fell broken by her

side, the horseman was borne onward. “Thank God, _you_ are saved!” was

poor Lucille’s exclamation; and she fell, overcome with pain and terror,

into the arms which the stranger mechanically opened to receive her.

“My guide! my friend!” cried he, “you are hurt, you--”

“No, sir,” interrupted Lucille, faintly, “I am better, I am well. _This_

arm, if you please,--we are not far from your hotel now.”

But the stranger’s ear, tutored to every inflection of voice, told

him at once of the pain she suffered. He drew from her by degrees the

confession of the injury she had sustained; but the generous girl did

not tell him it had been incurred solely in his protection. He now

insisted on reversing their duties, and accompanying _her_ to her home;

and Lucille, almost fainting with pain, and hardly able to move, was

forced to consent. But a few steps down the next turning stood the

humble mansion of her father. They reached it; and Lucille scarcely

crossed the threshold, before she sank down, and for some minutes was

insensible to pain. It was left to the stranger to explain, and to

beseech them immediately to send for a surgeon, “the most skilful, the

most practised in the town,” said he. “See, I am rich, and this is the

least I can do to atone to your generous daughter, for not forsaking

even a stranger in peril.”

He held out his purse as he spoke, but the father refused the offer; and

it saved the blind man some shame, that he could not see the blush of

honest resentment with which so poor a species of renumeration was put

aside.

The young man stayed till the surgeon arrived, till the arm was set; nor

did he depart until he had obtained a promise from the mother that he

should learn the next morning how the sufferer had passed the night.

The next morning, indeed, he had intended to quit a town that offers but

little temptation to the traveller; but he tarried day after day, until

Lucille herself accompanied her mother, to assure him of her recovery.

You know, at least I do, dearest Gertrude, that there is such a thing as

love at the first meeting,--a secret, an unaccountable affinity between

persons (strangers before) which draws them irresistibly together,--as

if there were truth in Plato’s beautiful fantasy, that our souls were

a portion of the stars, and that spirits, thus attracted to each other,

have drawn their original light from the same orb, and yearn for a

renewal of their former union. Yet without recurring to such fanciful

solutions of a daily mystery, it was but natural that one in the forlorn

and desolate condition of Eugene St. Amand should have felt a certain

tenderness for a person who had so generously suffered for his sake.

The darkness to which he was condemned did not shut from his mind’s eye

the haunting images of Ideal beauty; rather, on the contrary, in his

perpetual and unoccupied solitude, he fed the reveries of an imagination

naturally warm, and a heart eager for sympathy and commune.

He had said rightly that his only test of beauty was in the melody of

voice; and never had a softer or more thrilling tone than that of the

young maiden touched upon his ear. Her exclamation, so beautifully

denying self, so devoted in its charity, “Thank God, _you_ are saved!”

uttered too in the moment of her own suffering, rang constantly upon his

soul, and he yielded, without precisely defining their nature, to vague

and delicious sentiments, that his youth had never awakened to till

then. And Lucille--the very accident that had happened to her on his

behalf only deepened the interest she had already conceived for one who,

in the first flush of youth, was thus cut off from the glad objects of

life, and left to a night of years desolate and alone. There is, to your

beautiful and kindly sex, a natural inclination to _protect_. This makes

them the angels of sickness, the comforters of age, the fosterers

of childhood; and this feeling, in Lucille peculiarly developed, had

already inexpressibly linked her compassionate nature to the lot of the

unfortunate traveller. With ardent affections, and with thoughts beyond

her station and her years, she was not without that modest vanity

which made her painfully susceptible to her own deficiencies in beauty.

Instinctively conscious of how deeply she herself could love, she

believed it impossible that she could ever be so loved in return. The

stranger, so superior in her eyes to all she had yet seen, was the first

who had ever addressed her in that voice which by tones, not words,

speaks that admiration most dear to a woman’s heart. To _him_ she was

beautiful, and her lovely mind spoke out, undimmed by the imperfections

of her face. Not, indeed, that Lucille was wholly without personal

attraction; her light step and graceful form were elastic with the

freshness of youth, and her mouth and smile had so gentle and tender

an expression, that there were moments when it would not have been

the blind only who would have mistaken her to be beautiful. Her early

childhood had indeed given the promise of attractions, which the

smallpox, that then fearful malady, had inexorably marred. It had not

only seared the smooth skin and brilliant hues, but utterly changed even

the character of the features. It so happened that Lucille’s family were

celebrated for beauty, and vain of that celebrity; and so bitterly had

her parents deplored the effects of the cruel malady, that poor Lucille

had been early taught to consider them far more grievous than they

really were, and to exaggerate the advantages of that beauty, the loss

of which was considered by her parents so heavy a misfortune. Lucille,

too, had a cousin named Julie, who was the wonder of all Malines for

her personal perfections; and as the cousins were much together, the

contrast was too striking not to occasion frequent mortification to

Lucille. But every misfortune has something of a counterpoise; and the

consciousness of personal inferiority had meekened, without souring, her

temper, had given gentleness to a spirit that otherwise might have been

too high, and humility to a mind that was naturally strong, impassioned,

and energetic.

And yet Lucille had long conquered the one disadvantage she most dreaded

in the want of beauty. Lucille was never known but to be loved.

Wherever came her presence, her bright and soft mind diffused a certain

inexpressible charm; and where she was not, a something was absent from

the scene which not even Julie’s beauty could replace.

“I propose,” said St. Amand to Madame le Tisseur, Lucille’s mother,

as he sat in her little salon,--for he had already contracted that

acquaintance with the family which permitted him to be led to their

house, to return the visits Madame le Tisseur had made him, and his dog,

once more returned a penitent to his master, always conducted his

steps to the humble abode, and stopped instinctively at the door,--“I

propose,” said St. Amand, after a pause, and with some embarrassment,

“to stay a little while longer at Malines; the air agrees with me, and

I like the quiet of the place; but you are aware, madam, that at a hotel

among strangers, I feel my situation somewhat cheerless. I have been

thinking”--St. Amand paused again--“I have been thinking that if I could

persuade some agreeable family to receive me as a lodger, I would fix

myself here for some weeks. I am easily pleased.”

“Doubtless there are many in Malines who would be too happy to receive

such a lodger.”

“Will you receive me?” asked St. Amand, abruptly. “It was of _your_

family I thought.”

“Of us? Monsieur is too flattering. But we have scarcely a room good

enough for you.”

“What difference between one room and another can there be to me? That

is the best apartment to my choice in which the human voice sounds most

kindly.”

The arrangement was made, and St. Amand came now to reside beneath the

same roof as Lucille. And was she not happy that _he_ wanted so constant

an attendance; was she not happy that she was ever of use? St. Amand was

passionately fond of music; he played himself with a skill that was

only surpassed by the exquisite melody of his voice, and was not Lucille

happy when she sat mute and listening to such sounds as in Malines

were never heard before? Was she not happy in gazing on a face to whose

melancholy aspect her voice instantly summoned the smile? Was she not

happy when the music ceased, and St. Amand called “Lucille”? Did not her

own name uttered by that voice seem to her even sweeter than the music?

Was she not happy when they walked out in the still evenings of summer,

and her arm thrilled beneath the light touch of one to whom she was

so necessary? Was she not proud in her happiness, and was there not

something like worship in the gratitude she felt to him for raising her

humble spirit to the luxury of feeling herself beloved?

St. Amand’s parents were French. They had resided in the neighbourhood

of Amiens, where they had inherited a competent property, to which he

had succeeded about two years previous to the date of my story.

He had been blind from the age of three years. “I know not,” said he,

as he related these particulars to Lucille one evening when they were

alone,--“I know not what the earth may be like, or the heaven, or the

rivers whose voice at least I can hear, for I have no recollection

beyond that of a confused but delicious blending of a thousand glorious

colours, a bright and quick sense of joy, A VISIBLE MUSIC. But it is

only since my childhood closed that I have mourned, as I now unceasingly

mourn, for the light of day. My boyhood passed in a quiet cheerfulness;

the least trifle then could please and occupy the vacancies of my mind;

but it was as I took delight in being read to, as I listened to the

vivid descriptions of Poetry, as I glowed at the recital of great deeds,

as I was made acquainted by books with the energy, the action, the heat,

the fervour, the pomp, the enthusiasm of life, that I gradually opened

to the sense of all I was forever denied. I felt that I existed, not

lived; and that, in the midst of the Universal Liberty, I was sentenced

to a prison, from whose blank walls there was no escape. Still, however,

while my parents lived, I had something of consolation; at least I was

not alone. They died, and a sudden and dread solitude, a vast and empty

dreariness, settled upon my dungeon. One old servant only, who had

attended me from my childhood, who had known me in my short privilege of

light, by whose recollections my mind could grope back its way through

the dark and narrow passages of memory to faint glimpses of the sun,

was all that remained to me of human sympathies. It did not suffice,

however, to content me with a home where my father and my mother’s kind

voice were _not_. A restless impatience, an anxiety to move, possessed

me, and I set out from my home, journeying whither I cared not, so that

at least I could change an air that weighed upon me like a palpable

burden. I took only this old attendant as my companion; he too died

three months since at Bruxelles, worn out with years. Alas! I had

forgotten that he was old, for I saw not his progress to decay; and now,

save my faithless dog, I was utterly alone, till I came hither and found

_thee_.”

Lucille stooped down to caress the dog; she blessed the desertion that

had led him to a friend who never could desert.

But however much, and however gratefully, St. Amand loved Lucille,

her power availed not to chase the melancholy from his brow, and to

reconcile him to his forlorn condition.

“Ah, would that I could see thee! would that I could look upon a face

that my heart vainly endeavours to delineate!”

“If thou couldst,” sighed Lucille, “thou wouldst cease to love me.”

“Impossible!” cried St. Amand, passionately. “However the world may find

thee, _thou_ wouldst become my standard of beauty; and I should judge

not of thee by others, but of others by thee.”

He loved to hear Lucille read to him, and mostly he loved the

descriptions of war, of travel, of wild adventure, and yet they

occasioned him the most pain. Often she paused from the page as she

heard him sigh, and felt that she would even have renounced the bliss of

being loved by him, if she could have restored to him that blessing, the

desire for which haunted him as a spectre.

Lucille’s family were Catholic, and, like most in their station, they

possessed the superstitions, as well as the devotion of the faith.

Sometimes they amused themselves of an evening by the various legends

and imaginary miracles of their calendar; and once, as they were thus

conversing with two or three of their neighbours, “The Tomb of the Three

Kings of Cologne” became the main topic of their wondering recitals.

However strong was the sense of Lucille, she was, as you will readily

conceive, naturally influenced by the belief of those with whom she had

been brought up from her cradle, and she listened to tale after tale

of the miracles wrought at the consecrated tomb, as earnestly and

undoubtingly as the rest.

And the Kings of the East were no ordinary saints; to the relics of

the Three Magi, who followed the Star of Bethlehem, and were the first

potentates of the earth who adored its Saviour, well might the pious

Catholic suppose that a peculiar power and a healing sanctity would

belong. Each of the circle (St. Amand, who had been more than usually

silent, and even gloomy during the day, had retired to his own

apartment, for there were some moments when, in the sadness of his

thoughts, he sought that solitude which he so impatiently fled from at

others)--each of the circle had some story to relate equally veracious

and indisputable, of an infirmity cured, or a prayer accorded, or a sin

atoned for at the foot of the holy tomb. One story peculiarly affected

Lucille; the narrator, a venerable old man with gray locks, solemnly

declared himself a witness of its truth.

A woman at Anvers had given birth to a son, the offspring of an illicit

connection, who came into the world deaf and dumb. The unfortunate

mother believed the calamity a punishment for her own sin. “Ah, would,”

said she, “that the affliction had fallen only upon me! Wretch that I

am, my innocent child is punished for my offence!” This, idea haunted

her night and day; she pined and could not be comforted. As the child

grew up, and wound himself more and more round her heart, his caresses

added new pangs to her remorse; and at length (continued the narrator)

hearing perpetually of the holy fame of the Tomb of Cologne, she

resolved upon a pilgrimage barefoot to the shrine. “God is merciful,”

said she; “and He who called Magdalene his sister may take the mother’s

curse from the child.” She then went to Cologne; she poured her tears,

her penitence, and her prayers at the sacred tomb. When she returned to

her native town, what was her dismay as she approached her cottage to

behold it a heap of ruins! Its blackened rafters and yawning casements

betokened the ravages of fire. The poor woman sank upon the ground

utterly overpowered. Had her son perished? At that moment she heard

the cry of a child’s voice, and, lo! her child rushed to her arms, and

called her “mother!”

He had been saved from the fire, which had broken out seven days before;

but in the terror he had suffered, the string that tied his tongue had

been loosened; he had uttered articulate sounds of distress; the curse

was removed, and one word at least the kind neighbours had already

taught him to welcome his mother’s return. What cared she now that

her substance was gone, that her roof was ashes? She bowed in grateful

submission to so mild a stroke; her prayer had been heard, and the sin

of the mother was visited no longer on the child.

I have said, dear Gertrude, that this story made a deep impression upon

Lucille. A misfortune so nearly akin to that of St. Amand removed by the

prayer of another filled her with devoted thoughts and a beautiful hope.

“Is not the tomb still standing?” thought she. “Is not God still in

heaven?--He who heard the guilty, may He not hear the guiltless? Is He

not the God of love? Are not the affections the offerings that please

Him best? And what though the child’s mediator was his mother, can

even a mother love her child more tenderly than I love Eugene? But if,

Lucille, thy prayer be granted, if he recover his sight, _thy_ charm

is gone, he will love thee no longer. No matter! be it so,--I shall at

least have made him happy!”

Such were the thoughts that filled the mind of Lucille; she cherished

them till they settled into resolution, and she secretly vowed to

perform her pilgrimage of love. She told neither St. Amand nor her

parents of her intention; she knew the obstacles such an announcement

would create. Fortunately she had an aunt settled at Bruxelles, to whom

she had been accustomed once in every year to pay a month’s visit, and

at that time she generally took with her the work of a twelvemonths’

industry, which found a readier sale at Bruxelles than at Malines.

Lucille and St. Amand were already betrothed; their wedding was shortly

to take place; and the custom of the country leading parents, however

poor, to nourish the honourable ambition of giving some dowry with their

daughters, Lucille found it easy to hide the object of her departure,

under the pretence of taking the lace to Bruxelles, which had been the

year’s labour of her mother and herself,--it would sell for sufficient,

at least, to defray the preparations for the wedding.

“Thou art ever right, child,” said Madame le Tisseur; “the richer St.

Amand is, why, the less oughtest thou to go a beggar to his house.”

In fact, the honest ambition of the good people was excited; their pride

had been hurt by the envy of the town and the current congratulations on

so advantageous a marriage; and they employed themselves in counting

up the fortune they should be able to give to their only child, and

flattering their pardonable vanity with the notion that there would

be no such great disproportion in the connection after all. They were

right, but not in their own view of the estimate; the wealth that

Lucille brought was what fate could not lessen, reverse could not reach;

the ungracious seasons could not blight its sweet harvest; imprudence

could not dissipate, fraud could not steal, one grain from its abundant

coffers! Like the purse in the Fairy Tale, its use was hourly, its

treasure inexhaustible.

St. Amand alone was not to be won to her departure; he chafed at the

notion of a dowry; he was not appeased even by Lucille’s representation

that it was only to gratify and not to impoverish her parents. “And

_thou_, too, canst leave me!” he said, in that plaintive voice which had

made his first charm to Lucille’s heart. “It is a double blindness!”

“But for a few days; a fortnight at most, dearest Eugene.”

“A fortnight! you do not reckon time as the blind do,” said St. Amand,

bitterly.

“But listen, listen, dear Eugene,” said Lucille, weeping.

The sound of her sobs restored him to a sense of his ingratitude. Alas,

he knew not how much he had to be grateful for! He held out his arms

to her. “Forgive me,” said he. “Those who can see Nature know not how

terrible it is to be alone.”

“But my mother will not leave you.”

“She is not you!”

“And Julie,” said Lucille, hesitatingly.

“What is Julie to me?”

“Ah, you are the only one, save my parents, who could think of me in her

presence.”

“And why, Lucille?”

“Why! She is more beautiful than a dream.”

“Say not so. Would I could see, that I might prove to the world how much

more beautiful thou art! There is no music in her voice.”

The evening before Lucille departed she sat up late with St. Amand and

her mother. They conversed on the future; they made plans; in the wide

sterility of the world they laid out the garden of household love, and

filled it with flowers, forgetful of the wind that scatters and the

frost that kills. And when, leaning on Lucille’s arm, St. Amand sought

his chamber, and they parted at his door, which closed upon her, she

fell down on her knees at the threshold, and poured out the fulness of

her heart in a prayer for his safety and the fulfilment of her timid

hope.

At daybreak she was consigned to the conveyance that performed the short

journey from Malines to Bruxelles. When she entered the town, instead

of seeking her aunt, she rested at an _auberge_ in the suburbs, and

confiding her little basket of lace to the care of its hostess, she

set out alone, and on foot, upon the errand of her heart’s lovely

superstition. And erring though it was, her faith redeemed its weakness,

her affection made it even sacred; and well may we believe that the Eye

which reads all secrets scarce looked reprovingly on that fanaticism

whose only infirmity was love.

So fearful was she lest, by rendering the task too easy, she might

impair the effect, that she scarcely allowed herself rest or food.

Sometimes, in the heat of noon, she wandered a little from the roadside,

and under the spreading lime-tree surrendered her mind to its sweet and

bitter thoughts; but ever the restlessness of her enterprise urged

her on, and faint, weary, and with bleeding feet, she started up and

continued her way. At length she reached the ancient city, where a

holier age has scarce worn from the habits and aspects of men the Roman

trace. She prostrated herself at the tomb of the Magi; she proffered her

ardent but humble prayer to Him before whose Son those fleshless heads

(yet to faith at least preserved) had, eighteen centuries ago, bowed in

adoration. Twice every day, for a whole week, she sought the same spot,

and poured forth the same prayer. The last day an old priest, who,

hovering in the church, had observed her constantly at devotion, with

that fatherly interest which the better ministers of the Catholic sect

(that sect which has covered the earth with the mansions of charity)

feel for the unhappy, approached her as she was retiring with moist and

downcast eyes, and saluting her, assumed the privilege of his order to

inquire if there was aught in which his advice or aid could serve.

There was something in the venerable air of the old man which encouraged

Lucille; she opened her heart to him; she told him all. The good priest

was much moved by her simplicity and earnestness. He questioned her

minutely as to the peculiar species of blindness with which St. Amand

was afflicted; and after musing a little while, he said, “Daughter,

God is great and merciful; we must trust in His power, but we must

not forget that He mostly works by mortal agents. As you pass through

Louvain in your way home, fail not to see there a certain physician,

named Le Kain. He is celebrated through Flanders for the cures he has

wrought among the blind, and his advice is sought by all classes from

far and near. He lives hard by the Hotel de Ville, but any one will

inform you of his residence. Stay, my child, you shall take him a note

from me; he is a benevolent and kindly man, and you shall tell him

exactly the same story (and with the same voice) you have told to me.”

So saying the priest made Lucille accompany him to his home, and forcing

her to refresh herself less sparingly than she had yet done since she

had left Malines, he gave her his blessing, and a letter to Le Kain,

which he rightly judged would insure her a patient hearing from the

physician. Well known among all men of science was the name of the

priest, and a word of recommendation from him went further, where virtue

and wisdom were honoured, than the longest letter from the haughtiest

sieur in Flanders.

With a patient and hopeful spirit, the young pilgrim turned her back on

the Roman Cologne; and now about to rejoin St. Amand, she felt neither

the heat of the sun nor the weariness of the road. It was one day at

noon that she again passed through Louvain, and she soon found herself

by the noble edifice of the Hotel de Ville. Proud rose its spires

against the sky, and the sun shone bright on its rich tracery and

Gothic casements; the broad open street was crowded with persons of all

classes, and it was with some modest alarm that Lucille lowered her veil

and mingled with the throng. It was easy, as the priest had said, to

find the house of Le Kain; she bade the servant take the priest’s letter

to his master, and she was not long kept waiting before she was admitted

to the physician’s presence. He was a spare, tall man, with a bald

front, and a calm and friendly countenance. He was not less touched

than the priest had been by the manner in which she narrated her

story, described the affliction of her betrothed, and the hope that had

inspired the pilgrimage she had just made.

“Well,” said he, encouragingly, “we must see our patient. You can bring

him hither to me.”

“Ah, sir, I had hoped--” Lucille stopped suddenly.

“What, my young friend?”

“That I might have had the triumph of bringing you to Malines. I know,

sir, what you are about to say, and I know, sir, your time must be very

valuable; but I am not so poor as I seem, and Eugene, that is, M. St.

Amand, is very rich, and--and I have at Bruxelles what I am sure is

a large sum; it was to have provided for the wedding, but it is most

heartily at your service, sir.”

Le Kain smiled; he was one of those men who love to read the human

heart when its leaves are fair and undefiled; and, in the benevolence

of science, he would have gone a longer journey than from Louvain to

Malines to give sight to the blind, even had St. Amand been a beggar.

“Well, well,” said he, “but you forget that M. St. Amand is not the only

one in the world who wants me. I must look at my notebook, and see if I

can be spared for a day or two.”

So saying, he glanced at his memoranda. Everything smiled on Lucille; he

had no engagements that his partner could not fulfil, for some days; he

consented to accompany Lucille to Malines.

Meanwhile, cheerless and dull had passed the time to St. Amand. He was

perpetually asking Madame le Tisseur what hour it was,--it was almost

his only question. There seemed to him no sun in the heavens, no

freshness in the air, and he even forbore his favourite music; the

instrument had lost its sweetness since Lucille was not by to listen.

It was natural that the gossips of Malines should feel some envy at the

marriage Lucille was about to make with one whose competence report had

exaggerated into prodigal wealth, whose birth had been elevated from the

respectable to the noble, and whose handsome person was clothed, by the

interest excited by his misfortune, with the beauty of Antinous. Even

that misfortune, which ought to have levelled all distinctions, was not

sufficient to check the general envy; perhaps to some of the damsels

of Malines blindness in a husband would not have seemed an unwelcome

infirmity! But there was one in whom this envy rankled with a peculiar

sting: it was the beautiful, the all-conquering Julie! That the humble,

the neglected Lucille should be preferred to her; that Lucille, whose

existence was well-nigh forgot beside Julie’s, should become thus

suddenly of importance; that there should be one person in the world,

and that person young, rich, handsome, to whom she was less than

nothing, when weighed in the balance with Lucille, mortified to the

quick a vanity that had never till then received a wound. “It is well,”

she would say with a bitter jest, “that Lucille’s lover is blind. To be

the one it is necessary to be the other!”

During Lucille’s absence she had been constantly in Madame le Tisseur’s

house; indeed, Lucille had prayed her to be so. She had sought, with an

industry that astonished herself, to supply Lucille’s place; and among

the strange contradictions of human nature, she had learned during her

efforts to please, to love the object of those efforts,--as much at

least as she was capable of loving.

She conceived a positive hatred to Lucille; she persisted in imagining

that nothing but the accident of first acquaintance had deprived her

of a conquest with which she persuaded herself her happiness had become

connected. Had St. Amand never loved Lucille and proposed to Julie, his

misfortune would have made her reject him, despite his wealth and his

youth; but to be Lucille’s lover, and a conquest to be won from Lucille,

raised him instantly to an importance not his own. Safe, however, in his

affliction, the arts and beauty of Julie fell harmless on the fidelity

of St. Amand. Nay, he liked her less than ever, for it seemed an

impertinence in any one to counterfeit the anxiety and watchfulness of

Lucille.

“It is time, surely it is time, Madame le Tisseur, that Lucille should

return? She might have sold all the lace in Malines by this time,” said

St. Amand, one day, peevishly.

“Patience, my dear friend, patience; perhaps she may return to-morrow.”

“To-morrow! let me see, it is only six o’clock,--only six, you are

sure?”

“Just five, dear Eugene. Shall I read to you? This is a new book from

Paris; it has made a great noise,” said Julie.

“You are very kind, but I will not trouble you.”

“It is anything but trouble.”

“In a word, then, I would rather not.”

“Oh, that he could see!” thought Julie; “would I not punish him for

this!”

“I hear carriage wheels; who can be passing this way? Surely it is the

_voiturier_ from Bruxelles,” said St. Amand, starting up; “it is his

day,--his hour, too. No, no, it is a lighter vehicle,” and he sank down

listlessly on his seat.

Nearer and nearer rolled the wheels; they turned the corner; they

stopped at the lowly door; and, overcome, overjoyed, Lucille was clasped

to the bosom of St. Amand.

“Stay,” said she, blushing, as she recovered her self-possession, and

turned to Le Kain; “pray pardon me, sir. Dear Eugene, I have brought

with me one who, by God’s blessing, may yet restore you to sight.”

“We must not be sanguine, my child,” said Le Kain; “anything is better

than disappointment.”

To close this part of my story, dear Gertrude, Le Kain examined St.

Amand, and the result of the examination was a confident belief in the

probability of a cure. St. Amand gladly consented to the experiment of

an operation; it succeeded, the blind man saw! Oh, what were Lucille’s

feelings, what her emotion, what her joy, when she found the object of

her pilgrimage, of her prayers, fulfilled! That joy was so intense that

in the eternal alternations of human life she might have foretold from

its excess how bitter the sorrows fated to ensue.

As soon as by degrees the patient’s new sense became reconciled to the

light, his first, his only demand was for Lucille. “No, let me not see

her alone; let me see her in the midst of you all, that I may convince

you that the heart never is mistaken in its instincts.” With a fearful,

a sinking presentiment, Lucille yielded to the request, to which the

impetuous St. Amand would hear indeed no denial. The father, the

mother, Julie, Lucille, Julie’s younger sisters, assembled in the

little parlour; the door opened, and St. Amand stood hesitating on the

threshold. One look around sufficed to him; his face brightened, he

uttered a cry of joy. “Lucille! Lucille!” he exclaimed, “it is you, I

know it, _you_ only!” He sprang forward _and fell at the feet of Julie_!

Flushed, elated, triumphant, Julie bent upon him her sparkling eyes;

_she_ did not undeceive him.

“You are wrong, you mistake,” said Madame le Tisseur, in confusion;

“that is her cousin Julie,--this is your Lucille.”

St. Amand rose, turned, saw Lucille, and at that moment she wished

herself in her grave. Surprise, mortification, disappointment, almost

dismay, were depicted in his gaze. He had been haunting his prison-house

with dreams, and now, set free, he felt how unlike they were to the

truth. Too new to observation to read the woe, the despair, the lapse

and shrinking of the whole frame, that his look occasioned Lucille, he

yet felt, when the first shock of his surprise was over, that it was not

thus he should thank her who had restored him to sight. He hastened to

redeem his error--ah! how could it be redeemed?

From that hour all Lucille’s happiness was at an end; her fairy palace

was shattered in the dust; the magician’s wand was broken up; the

Ariel was given to the winds; and the bright enchantment no longer

distinguished the land she lived in from the rest of the barren

world. It is true that St. Amand’s words were kind; it is true that he

remembered with the deepest gratitude all she had done in his behalf;

it is true that he forced himself again and again to say, “She is my

betrothed, my benefactress!” and he cursed himself to think that the

feelings he had entertained for her were fled. Where was the passion of

his words; where the ardour of his tone; where that play and light of

countenance which her step, her voice, could formerly call forth? When

they were alone he was embarrassed and constrained, and almost cold;

his hand no longer sought hers, his soul no longer missed her if she was

absent a moment from his side. When in their household circle he seemed

visibly more at ease; but did his eyes fasten upon her who had opened

them to the day; did they not wander at every interval with a too

eloquent admiration to the blushing and radiant face of the exulting

Julie? This was not, you will believe, suddenly perceptible in one

day or one week, but every day it was perceptible more and more. Yet

still--bewitched, ensnared, as St. Amand was he never perhaps would have

been guilty of an infidelity that he strove with the keenest remorse to

wrestle against, had it not been for the fatal contrast, at the first

moment of his gushing enthusiasm, which Julie had presented to Lucille;

but for that he would have formed no previous idea of real and living

beauty to aid the disappointment of his imaginings and his dreams.

He would have seen Lucille young and graceful, and with eyes beaming

affection, contrasted only by the wrinkled countenance and bended frame

of her parents, and she would have completed her conquest over him

before he had discovered that she was less beautiful than others; nay,

more,--that infidelity never could have lasted above the first few days,

if the vain and heartless object of it had not exerted every art, all

the power and witchery of her beauty, to cement and continue it. The

unfortunate Lucille--so susceptible to the slightest change in those

she loved, so diffident of herself, so proud too in that diffidence--no

longer necessary, no longer missed, no longer loved, could not bear to

endure the galling comparison between the past and the present. She

fled uncomplainingly to her chamber to indulge her tears, and thus,

unhappily, absent as her father generally was during the day, and busied

as her mother was either at work or in household matters, she left Julie

a thousand opportunities to complete the power she had begun to wield

over--no, not the heart!--the _senses_ of St. Amand! Yet, still not

suspecting, in the open generosity of her mind, the whole extent of her

affliction, poor Lucille buoyed herself at times with the hope that when

once married, when, once in that intimacy of friendship, the unspeakable

love she felt for him could disclose itself with less restraint than at

present,--she would perhaps regain a heart which had been so devotedly

hers, that she could not think that without a fault it was irrevocably

gone: on that hope she anchored all the little happiness that remained

to her. And still St. Amand pressed their marriage, but in what

different tones! In fact, he wished to preclude from himself the

possibility of a deeper ingratitude than that which he had incurred

already. He vainly thought that the broken reed of love might be bound

up and strengthened by the ties of duty; and at least he was anxious

that his hand, his fortune, his esteem, his gratitude, should give

to Lucille the only recompense it was now in his power to bestow.

Meanwhile, left alone so often with Julie, and Julie bent on achieving

the last triumph over his heart, St. Amand was gradually preparing a

far different reward, a far different return, for her to whom he owed so

incalculable a debt.

There was a garden, behind the house, in which there was a small

arbour, where often in the summer evenings Eugene and Lucille had

sat together,--hours never to return! One day she heard from her own

chamber, where she sat mourning, the sound of St. Amand’s flute swelling

gently from that beloved and consecrated bower. She wept as she heard

it, and the memories that the music bore softening and endearing his

image, she began to reproach herself that she had yielded so often to

the impulse of her wounded feelings; that chilled by _his_ coldness, she

had left him so often to himself, and had not sufficiently dared to

tell him of that affection which, in her modest self-depreciation,

constituted her only pretension to his love. “Perhaps he is alone now,”

she thought; “the air too is one which he knows that I love;” and with

her heart in her step, she stole from the house and sought the arbour.

She had scarce turned from her chamber when the flute ceased; as she

neared the arbour she heard voices,--Julie’s voice in grief, St. Amand’s

in consolation. A dread foreboding seized her; her feet clung rooted to

the earth.

“Yes, marry her, forget me,” said Julie; “in a few days you will

be another’s, and I--I--forgive me, Eugene, forgive me that I have

disturbed your happiness. I am punished sufficiently; my heart will

break, but it will break in loving you.” Sobs choked Julie’s voice.

“Oh, speak not thus,” said St. Amand. “I, _I_ only am to blame,--I,

false to both, to both ungrateful. Oh, from the hour that these eyes

opened upon you I drank in a new life; the sun itself to me was less

wonderful than your beauty. But--but--let me forget that hour. What do I

not owe to Lucille? I shall be wretched,--I shall deserve to be so;

for shall I not think, Julie, that I have embittered your life with our

ill-fated love? But all that I can give--my hand, my home, my plighted

faith--must be hers. Nay, Julie, nay--why that look? Could I act

otherwise? Can I dream otherwise? Whatever the sacrifice, _must_ I not

render it? Ah, what do I owe to Lucille, were it only for the thought

that but for her I might never have seen thee!”

Lucille stayed to hear no more; with the same soft step as that which

had borne her within hearing of these fatal words, she turned back once

more to her desolate chamber.

That evening, as St. Amand was sitting alone in his apartment, he heard

a gentle knock at the door. “Come in,” he said, and Lucille entered. He

started in some confusion, and would have taken her hand, but she gently

repulsed him. She took a seat opposite to him, and looking down, thus

addressed him:--

“My dear Eugene, that is, Monsieur St. Amand, I have something on my

mind that I think it better to speak at once; and if I do not exactly

express what I would wish to say, you must not be offended with Lucille:

it is not an easy matter to put into words what one feels deeply.”

Colouring, and suspecting something of the truth, St. Amand would have

broken in upon her here; but she with a gentle impatience motioned him

to be silent, and continued:--

“You know that when you once loved me, I used to tell you that you would

cease to do so could you see how undeserving I was of your attachment. I

did not deceive myself, Eugene; I always felt assured that such would be

the case, that your love for me necessarily rested on your affliction.

But for all that I never at least had a dream or a desire but for your

happiness; and God knows, that if again, by walking barefooted, not to

Cologne, but to Rome--to the end of the world--I could save you from a

much less misfortune than that of blindness, I would cheerfully do it;

yes, even though I might foretell all the while that, on my return, you

would speak to me coldly, think of me lightly, and that the penalty to

me would--would be--what it has been!” Here Lucille wiped a few natural

tears from her eyes. St. Amand, struck to the heart, covered his

face with his hands, without the courage to interrupt her. Lucille

continued:--

“That which I foresaw has come to pass; I am no longer to you what I

once was, when you could clothe this poor form and this homely face with

a beauty they did not possess. You would wed me still, it is true; but I

am proud, Eugene, and cannot stoop to gratitude where I once had love.

I am not so unjust as to blame you; the change was natural, was

inevitable. I should have steeled myself more against it; but I am now

resigned. We must part; you love Julie--that too is natural--and _she_

loves you; ah! what also more in the probable course of events? Julie

loves you, not yet, perhaps, so much as I did; but then she has not

known you as I have, and she whose whole life has been triumph cannot

feel the gratitude that I felt at fancying myself loved; but this will

come--God grant it! Farewell, then, forever, dear Eugene; I leave you

when you no longer want me; you are now independent of Lucille; wherever

you go, a thousand hereafter can supply my place. Farewell!”

She rose, as she said this, to leave the room; but St. Amand seizing her

hand, which she in vain endeavoured to withdraw from his clasp, poured

forth incoherently, passionately, his reproaches on himself, his

eloquent persuasion against her resolution.

“I confess,” said he, “that I have been allured for a moment; I confess

that Julie’s beauty made me less sensible to your stronger, your holier,

oh! far, far holier title to my love! But forgive me, dearest Lucille;

already I return to you, to all I once felt for you; make me not curse

the blessing of sight that I owe to you. You must not leave me; never

can we two part. Try me, only try me, and if ever hereafter my heart

wander from you, _then_, Lucille, leave me to my remorse!”

Even at that moment Lucille did not yield; she felt that his prayer was

but the enthusiasm of the hour; she felt that there was a virtue in her

pride,--that to leave him was a duty to herself. In vain he pleaded; in

vain were his embraces, his prayers; in vain he reminded her of their

plighted troth, of her aged parents, whose happiness had become wrapped

in her union with him: “How,--even were it as you wrongly believe,--how,

in honour to them, can I desert you, can I wed another?”

“Trust that, trust all, to me,” answered Lucille; “your honour shall

be my care, none shall blame _you_; only do not let your marriage with

Julie be celebrated here before their eyes: that is all I ask, all they

can expect. God bless you! do not fancy I shall be unhappy, for whatever

happiness the world gives you, shall I not have contributed to bestow

it? and with that thought I am above compassion.”

She glided from his arms, and left him to a solitude more bitter even

than that of blindness. That very night Lucille sought her mother; to

her she confided all. I pass over the reasons she urged, the arguments

she overcame; she conquered rather than convinced, and leaving to Madame

le Tisseur the painful task of breaking to her father her unalterable

resolution, she quitted Malines the next morning, and with a heart too

honest to be utterly without comfort, paid that visit to her aunt which

had been so long deferred.

The pride of Lucille’s parents prevented them from reproaching St.

Amand. He could not bear, however, their cold and altered looks; he left

their house; and though for several days he would not even see Julie,

yet her beauty and her art gradually resumed their empire over him. They

were married at Courtroi, and to the joy of the vain Julie departed to

the gay metropolis of France. But, before their departure, before his

marriage, St. Amand endeavoured to appease his conscience by obtaining

for M. le Tisseur a much more lucrative and honourable office than that

he now held. Rightly judging that Malines could no longer be a pleasant

residence for them, and much less for Lucille, the duties of the post

were to be fulfilled in another town; and knowing that M. le Tisseur’s

delicacy would revolt at receiving such a favour from his hands, he kept

the nature of his negotiation a close secret, and suffered the honest

citizen to believe that his own merits alone had entitled him to so

unexpected a promotion.

Time went on. This quiet and simple history of humble affections took

its date in a stormy epoch of the world,--the dawning Revolution of

France. The family of Lucille had been little more than a year settled

in their new residence when Dumouriez led his army into the Netherlands.

But how meanwhile had that year passed for Lucille? I have said that her

spirit was naturally high; that though so tender, she was not weak. Her

very pilgrimage to Cologne alone, and at the timid age of seventeen,

proved that there was a strength in her nature no less than a devotion

in her love. The sacrifice she had made brought its own reward.

She believed St. Amand was happy, and she would not give way to the

selfishness of grief; she had still duties to perform; she could still

comfort her parents and cheer their age; she could still be all the

world to them: she felt this, and was consoled. Only once during the

year had she heard of Julie; she had been seen by a mutual friend at

Paris, gay, brilliant, courted, and admired; of St. Amand she heard

nothing.

My tale, dear Gertrude, does not lead me through the harsh scenes of

war. I do not tell you of the slaughter and the siege, and the blood

that inundated those fair lands,--the great battlefield of Europe. The

people of the Netherlands in general were with the cause of Dumouriez,

but the town in which Le Tisseur dwelt offered some faint resistance to

his arms. Le Tisseur himself, despite his age, girded on his sword; the

town was carried, and the fierce and licentious troops of the conqueror

poured, flushed with their easy victory, through its streets. Le

Tisseur’s house was filled with drunken and rude troopers; Lucille

herself trembled in the fierce gripe of one of those dissolute soldiers,

more bandit than soldier, whom the subtle Dumouriez had united to his

army, and by whose blood he so often saved that of his nobler band. Her

shrieks, her cries, were vain, when suddenly the troopers gave way. “The

Captain! brave Captain!” was shouted forth; the insolent soldier, felled

by a powerful arm, sank senseless at the feet of Lucille, and a glorious

form, towering above its fellows,--even through its glittering garb,

even in that dreadful hour, remembered at a glance by Lucille,--stood

at her side; her protector, her guardian! Thus once more she beheld St.

Amand!

The house was cleared in an instant, the door barred. Shouts, groans,

wild snatches of exulting song, the clang of arms, the tramp of horses,

the hurrying footsteps, the deep music sounded loud, and blended

terribly without. Lucille heard them not,--she was on that breast which

never should have deserted her.

Effectually to protect his friends, St. Amand took up his quarters at

their house; and for two days he was once more under the same roof as

Lucille. He never recurred voluntarily to Julie; he answered Lucille’s

timid inquiry after her health briefly, and with coldness, but he spoke

with all the enthusiasm of a long-pent and ardent spirit of the new

profession he had embraced. Glory seemed now to be his only mistress;

and the vivid delusion of the first bright dreams of the Revolution

filled his mind, broke from his tongue, and lighted up those dark eyes

which Lucille had redeemed to day.

She saw him depart at the head of his troops; she saw his proud crest

glancing in the sun; she saw his steed winding through the narrow

street; she saw that his last glance reverted to her, where she stood at

the door; and, as he waved his adieu, she fancied that there was on his

face that look of deep and grateful tenderness which reminded her of the

one bright epoch of her life.

She was right; St. Amand had long since in bitterness repented of a

transient infatuation, had long since distinguished the true Florimel

from the false, and felt that, in Julie, Lucille’s wrongs were avenged.

But in the hurry and heat of war he plunged that regret--the keenest of

all--which embodies the bitter words, “TOO LATE!”

Years passed away, and in the resumed tranquillity of Lucille’s life the

brilliant apparition of St. Amand appeared as something dreamed of, not

seen. The star of Napoleon had risen above the horizon; the romance of

his early career had commenced; and the campaign of Egypt had been the

herald of those brilliant and meteoric successes which flashed forth

from the gloom of the Revolution of France.

You are aware, dear Gertrude, how many in the French as well as the

English troops returned home from Egypt blinded with the ophthalmia of

that arid soil. Some of the young men in Lucille’s town, who had joined

Napoleon’s army, came back darkened by that fearful affliction, and

Lucille’s alms and Lucille’s aid and Lucille’s sweet voice were ever

at hand for those poor sufferers, whose common misfortune touched so

thrilling a chord of her heart.

Her father was now dead, and she had only her mother to cheer amidst the

ills of age. As one evening they sat at work together, Madame le Tisseur

said, after a pause,--

“I wish, dear Lucille, thou couldst be persuaded to marry Justin; he

loves thee well, and now that thou art yet young, and hast many years

before thee, thou shouldst remember that when I die thou wilt be alone.”

“Ah, cease, dearest mother, I never can marry now; and as for love--once

taught in the bitter school in which I have learned the knowledge of

myself--I cannot be deceived again.”

“My Lucille, you do not know yourself. Never was woman loved if Justin

does not love you; and never did lover feel with more real warmth how

worthily he loved.”

And this was true; and not of Justin alone, for Lucille’s modest

virtues, her kindly temper, and a certain undulating and feminine grace,

which accompanied all her movements, had secured her as many conquests

as if she had been beautiful. She had rejected all offers of marriage

with a shudder; without even the throb of a flattered vanity. One

memory, sadder, was also dearer to her than all things; and something

sacred in its recollections made her deem it even a crime to think of

effacing the past by a new affection.

“I believe,” continued Madame le Tisseur, angrily, “that thou still

thinkest fondly of him from whom only in the world thou couldst have

experienced ingratitude.”

“Nay, Mother,” said Lucille, with a blush and a slight sigh, “Eugene is

married to another.”

While thus conversing, they heard a gentle and timid knock at the door;

the latch was lifted. “This,” said the rough voice of a _commissionaire_

of the town, “this, monsieur, is the house of Madame le Tisseur, and

_voila mademoiselle_!” A tall figure, with a shade over his eyes, and

wrapped in a long military cloak, stood in the room. A thrill shot

across Lucille’s heart. He stretched out his arms. “Lucille,” said that

melancholy voice, which had made the music of her first youth, “where

art thou, Lucille? Alas! she does not recognize St. Amand.”

Thus was it indeed. By a singular fatality, the burning suns and the

sharp dust of the plains of Egypt had smitten the young soldier, in

the flush of his career, with a second--and this time with an

irremediable--blindness! He had returned to France to find his hearth

lonely. Julie was no more,--a sudden fever had cut her off in the midst

of youth; and he had sought his way to Lucille’s house, to see if one

hope yet remained to him in the world!

And when, days afterwards, humbly and sadly he re-urged a former suit,

did Lucille shut her heart to its prayer? Did her pride remember its

wound; did she revert to his desertion; did she reply to the whisper of

her yearning love, “_Thou hast been before forsaken_”? That voice and

those darkened eyes pleaded to her with a pathos not to be resisted. “I

am once more necessary to him,” was all her thought; “if I reject him

who will tend him?” In that thought was the motive of her conduct; in

that thought gushed back upon her soul all the springs of checked but

unconquered, unconquerable love! In that thought, she stood beside him

at the altar, and pledged, with a yet holier devotion than she might

have felt of yore, the vow of her imperishable truth.

And Lucille found, in the future, a reward, which the common world could

never comprehend. With his blindness returned all the feelings she had

first awakened in St. Amand’s solitary heart; again he yearned for her

step, again he missed even a moment’s absence from his side, again her

voice chased the shadow from his brow, and in her presence was a sense

of shelter and of sunshine. He no longer sighed for the blessing he had

lost; he reconciled himself to fate, and entered into that serenity of

mood which mostly characterizes the blind.

Perhaps after we have seen the actual world, and experienced its hollow

pleasures, we can resign ourselves the better to its exclusion; and

as the cloister, which repels the ardour of our hope, is sweet to

our remembrance, so the darkness loses its terror when experience has

wearied us with the glare and travail of the day. It was something, too,

as they advanced in life, to feel the chains that bound him to Lucille

strengthening daily, and to cherish in his overflowing heart the

sweetness of increasing gratitude; it was something that he could not

see years wrinkle that open brow, or dim the tenderness of that touching

smile; it was something that to him she was beyond the reach of time,

and preserved to the verge of a grave (which received them both within

a few days of each other) in all the bloom of her unwithering affection,

in all the freshness of a heart that never could grow old!

Gertrude, who had broken in upon Trevylyan’s story by a thousand anxious

interruptions, and a thousand pretty apologies for interrupting, was

charmed with a tale in which true love was made happy at last, although

she did not forgive St. Amand his ingratitude, and although she

declared, with a critical shake of the head, that “it was very unnatural

that the mere beauty of Julie, or the mere want of it in Lucille, should

have produced such an effect upon him, if he had ever _really_ loved

Lucille in his blindness.”

As they passed through Malines, the town assumed an interest in

Gertrude’s eyes to which it scarcely of itself was entitled. She looked

wistfully at the broad market-place, at a corner of which was one of

those out-of-door groups of quiet and noiseless revellers, which Dutch

art has raised from the Familiar to the Picturesque; and then glancing

to the tower of St. Rembauld, she fancied, amidst the silence of noon,

that she yet heard the plaintive cry of the blind orphan, “Fido, Fido,

why hast thou deserted me?”

CHAPTER V. ROTTERDAM.--THE CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH.--THEIR RESEMBLANCE TO

THE GERMANS.--A DISPUTE BETWEEN VANE AND TREVYLYAN, AFTER THE MANNER OF

THE ANCIENT NOVELISTS, AS TO WHICH IS PREFERABLE, THE LIFE OF ACTION OR

THE LIFE OF REPOSE.--TREVYLYAN’S CONTRAST BETWEEN LITERARY AMBITION AND

THE AMBITION OF PUBLIC LIFE.

OUR travellers arrived at Rotterdam on a bright and sunny day. There is

a cheerfulness about the operations of Commerce,--a life, a bustle,

an action which always exhilarate the spirits at the first glance.

Afterwards they fatigue us; we get too soon behind the scenes, and find

the base and troublous passions which move the puppets and conduct the

drama.

But Gertrude, in whom ill health had not destroyed the vividness of

impression that belongs to the inexperienced, was delighted at the

cheeriness of all around her. As she leaned lightly on Trevylyan’s arm,

he listened with a forgetful joy to her questions and exclamations

at the stir and liveliness of a city from which was to commence their

pilgrimage along the Rhine. And indeed the scene was rife with the

spirit of that people at once so active and so patient, so daring on

the sea, so cautious on the land. Industry was visible everywhere; the

vessels in the harbour, the crowded boat putting off to land, the

throng on the quay,--all looked bustling and spoke of commerce. The city

itself, on which the skies shone fairly through light and fleecy clouds,

wore a cheerful aspect. The church of St. Lawrence rising above the

clean, neat houses, and on one side trees thickly grouped, gayly

contrasted at once the waters and the city.

“I like this place,” said Gertrude’s father, quietly; “it has an air of

comfort.”

“And an absence of grandeur,” said Trevylyan.

“A commercial people are one great middle-class in their habits and

train of mind,” replied Vane; “and grandeur belongs to the extremes,--an

impoverished population and a wealthy despot.”

They went to see the statue of Erasmus, and the house in which he was

born. Vane had a certain admiration for Erasmus which his companions did

not share; he liked the quiet irony of the sage, and his knowledge of

the world; and, besides, Vane was at that time of life when philosophers

become objects of interest. At first they are teachers; secondly,

friends; and it is only a few who arrive at the third stage, and find

them deceivers. The Dutch are a singular people. Their literature

is neglected, but it has some of the German vein in its strata,--the

patience, the learning, the homely delineation, and even some traces of

the mixture of the humorous and the terrible which form that genius for

the grotesque so especially German--you find this in their legends and

ghost-stories. But in Holland activity destroys, in Germany indolence

nourishes, romance.

They stayed a day or two at Rotterdam, and then proceeded up the Rhine

to Gorcum. The banks were flat and tame, and nothing could be less

impressive of its native majesty than this part of the course of the

great river.

“I never felt before,” whispered Gertrude, tenderly, “how much there

was of consolation in your presence; for here I am at last on the

Rhine,--the blue Rhine, and how disappointed I should be if you were not

by my side!”

“But, my Gertrude, you must wait till we have passed Cologne, before the

_glories_ of the Rhine burst upon you.”

“It reverses life, my child,” said the moralizing Vane; “and the

stream flows through dulness at first, reserving its poetry for our

perseverance.”

“I will not allow your doctrine,” said Trevylyan, as the ambitious

ardour of his native disposition stirred within him. “Life has

always action; it is our own fault if it ever be dull: youth has its

enterprise, manhood its schemes; and even if infirmity creep upon age,

the mind, the mind still triumphs over the mortal clay, and in the quiet

hermitage, among books, and from thoughts, keeps the great wheel within

everlastingly in motion. No, the better class of spirits have always an

antidote to the insipidity of a common career, they have ever energy at

will--”

“And never happiness!” answered Vane, after a pause, as he gazed on the

proud countenance of Trevylyan, with that kind of calm, half-pitying

interest which belonged to a character deeply imbued with the philosophy

of a sad experience acting upon an unimpassioned heart. “And in truth,

Trevylyan, it would please me if I could but teach you the folly of

preferring the exercise of that energy of which you speak to the golden

luxuries of REST. What ambition can ever bring an adequate reward? Not,

surely, the ambition of letters, the desire of intellectual renown!”

“True,” said Trevylyan, quietly; “that dream I have long renounced;

there is nothing palpable in literary fame,--it scarcely perhaps soothes

the vain, it assuredly chafes the proud. In my earlier years I attempted

some works which gained what the world, perhaps rightly, deemed a

sufficient need of reputation; yet it was not sufficient to recompense

myself for the fresh hours I had consumed, for the sacrifices of

pleasure I had made. The subtle aims that had inspired me were not

perceived; the thoughts that had seemed new and beautiful to me fell

flat and lustreless on the soul of others. If I was approved, it

was often for what I condemned myself; and I found that the trite

commonplace and the false wit charmed, while the truth fatigued, and

the enthusiasm revolted. For men of that genius to which I make no

pretension, who have dwelt apart in the obscurity of their own thoughts,

gazing upon stars that shine not for the dull sleepers of the world, it

must be a keen sting to find the product of their labour confounded

with a class, and to be mingled up in men’s judgment with the faults

or merits of a tribe. Every great genius must deem himself original

and alone in his conceptions. It is not enough for him that these

conceptions should be approved as good, unless they are admitted as

inventive, if they mix him with the herd he has shunned, not separate

him in fame as he has been separated in soul. Some Frenchman, the oracle

of his circle, said of the poet of the ‘Phedre,’ ‘Racine and the other

imitators of Corneille;’ and Racine, in his wrath, nearly forswore

tragedy forever. It is in vain to tell the author that the public is the

judge of his works. The author believes himself above the public, or he

would never have written; and,” continued Trevylyan, with enthusiasm,

“he _is_ above them; their fiat may crush his glory, but never his

self-esteem. He stands alone and haughty amidst the wrecks of the temple

he imagined he had raised ‘To THE FUTURE,’ and retaliates neglect with

scorn. But is this, the life of scorn, a pleasurable state of existence?

Is it one to be cherished? Does even the moment of fame counterbalance

the years of mortification? And what is there in literary fame itself

present and palpable to its heir? His work is a pebble thrown into

the deep; the stir lasts for a moment, and the wave closes up, to be

susceptible no more to the same impression. The circle may widen to

other lands and other ages, but around _him_ it is weak and faint. The

trifles of the day, the low politics, the base intrigues, occupy the

tongue, and fill the thought of his contemporaries. He is less known

than a mountebank, or a new dancer; his glory comes not home to him; it

brings no present, no perpetual reward, like the applauses that wait the

actor, or the actor-like murmur of the senate; and this, which vexes,

also lowers him; his noble nature begins to nourish the base vices of

jealousy, and the unwillingness to admire. Goldsmith is forgotten in the

presence of a puppet; he feels it, and is mean; he expresses it, and

is ludicrous. It is well to say that great minds will not stoop to

jealousy; in the greatest minds, it is most frequent.* Few authors are

ever so aware of the admiration they excite as to afford to be generous;

and this melancholy truth revolts us with our own ambition. Shall we be

demigods in our closets at the price of sinking below mortality in the

world? No! it was from this deep sentiment of the unrealness of literary

fame, of dissatisfaction at the fruits it produced, of fear for the

meanness it engendered, that I resigned betimes all love for its career;

and if, by the restless desire that haunts men who think much to write

ever, I should be urged hereafter to literature, I will sternly teach

myself to persevere in the indifference to its fame.”

* See the long list of names furnished by Disraeli, in that most

exquisite work, “The Literary Character,” vol. ii. p. 75. Plato,

Xenophon, Chaucer, Corneille, Voltaire, Dryden, the Caracci,

Domenico Venetiano, murdered by his envious friend, and the gentle

Castillo fainting away at the genius of Murillo.

“You say as I would say,” answered Vane, with his tranquil smile; “and

your experience corroborates my theory. Ambition, then, is not the root

of happiness. Why more in action than in letters?”

“Because,” said Trevylyan, “in action we commonly gain in our life all

the honour we deserve: the public judge of men better and more rapidly

than of books. And he who takes to himself in action a high and pure

ambition, associates it with so many objects, that, unlike literature,

the failure of one is balanced by the success of the other. He, the

creator of deeds, not resembling the creator of books, stands not alone;

he is eminently social; he has many comrades, and without their aid

he could not accomplish his designs. This divides and mitigates the

impatient jealousy against others. He works for a cause, and knows early

that he cannot monopolize its whole glory; he shares what he is aware

it is impossible to engross. Besides, action leaves him no time for

brooding over disappointment. The author has consumed his youth in a

work,--it fails in glory. Can he write another work? Bid him call back

another youth! But in action, the labour of the mind is from day to day.

A week replaces what a week has lost, and all the aspirant’s fame is of

the present. It is lipped by the Babel of the living world; he is

ever on the stage, and the spectators are ever ready to applaud. Thus

perpetually in the service of others self ceases to be his world; he has

no leisure to brood over real or imaginary wrongs; the excitement whirls

on the machine till it is worn out--”

“And kicked aside,” said Vane, “with the broken lumber of men’s other

tools, in the chamber of their son’s forgetfulness. Your man of action

lasts but for an hour; the man of letters lasts for ages.”

“We live not for ages,” answered Trevylyan; “our life is on earth, and

not in the grave.”

“But even grant,” continued Vane--“and I for one will concede the

point--that posthumous fame is not worth the living agonies that obtain

it, how are you better off in your poor and vulgar career of action?

Would you assist the rulers?--servility! The people?--folly! If you take

the great philosophical view which the worshippers of the past rarely

take, but which, unknown to them, is their sole excuse,--namely, that

the changes which _may_ benefit the future unsettle the present; and

that it is not the wisdom of practical legislation to risk the peace

of our contemporaries in the hope of obtaining happiness for their

posterity,--to what suspicions, to what charges are you exposed! You are

deemed the foe of all liberal opinion, and you read your curses in the

eyes of a nation. But take the side of the people. What caprice, what

ingratitude! You have professed so much in theory, that you can never

accomplish sufficient in practice. Moderation becomes a crime; to be

prudent is to be perfidious. New demagogues, without temperance, because

without principle, outstrip you in the moment of your greatest services.

The public is the grave of a great man’s deeds; it is never sated; its

maw is eternally open; it perpetually craves for more. Where, in the

history of the world, do you find the gratitude of a people? You find

fervour, it is true, but not gratitude,--the fervour that exaggerates a

benefit at one moment, but not the gratitude that remembers it the next

year. Once disappoint them, and all your actions, all your sacrifices,

are swept from their remembrance forever; they break the windows of the

very house they have given you, and melt down their medals into bullets.

Who serves man, ruler or peasant, serves the ungrateful; and all the

ambitious are but types of a Wolsey or a De Witt.”

“And what,” said Trevylyan, “consoles a man in the ills that flesh is

heir to, in that state of obscure repose, that serene inactivity to

which you would confine him? Is it not his conscience? Is it not his

self-acquittal, or his self-approval?”

“Doubtless,” replied Vane.