At length, one day, for the thought seemed to strike them

simultaneously, they conferred together about giving a great

entertainment in their grandest rooms to any of their neighbours who

chose to come, or indeed to any inhabitants of the earth or air who

would visit them. They were too proud to reflect that some company might

defile even the dwellers in what was undoubtedly the finest palace on

the face of the earth. But what made the thing worse, was, that the old

tradition said that these rooms were to be kept entirely for the use of

the owner of the castle. And, indeed, whenever they entered them, such

was the effect of their loftiness and grandeur upon their minds, that

they always thought of the old story, and could not help believing it.

Nor would the brother permit them to forget it now; but, appearing

suddenly amongst them, when they had no expectation of being interrupted

by him, he rebuked them, both for the indiscriminate nature of their

invitation, and for the intention of introducing any one, not to speak

of some who would doubtless make their appearance on the evening in

question, into the rooms kept sacred for the use of the unknown father.

But by this time their talk with each other had so excited their

expectations of enjoyment, which had previously been strong enough, that

anger sprung up within them at the thought of being deprived of their

hopes, and they looked each other in the eyes; and the look said: “We

are many and he is one--let us get rid of him, for he is always finding

fault, and thwarting us in the most innocent pleasures;--as if we would

wish to do anything wrong!” So without a word spoken, they rushed upon

him; and although he was stronger than any of them, and struggled hard

at first, yet they overcame him at last. Indeed some of them thought he

yielded to their violence long before they had the mastery of him; and

this very submission terrified the more tender-hearted amongst them.

However, they bound him; carried him down many stairs, and, having

remembered an iron staple in the wall of a certain vault, with a thick

rusty chain attached to it, they bore him thither, and made the chain

fast around him. There they left him, shutting the great gnarring brazen

door of the vault, as they departed for the upper regions of the castle.

Now all was in a tumult of preparation. Every one was talking of the

coming festivity; but no one spoke of the deed they had done. A sudden

paleness overspread the face, now of one, and now of another; but it

passed away, and no one took any notice of it; they only plied the task

of the moment the more energetically. Messengers were sent far and near,

not to individuals or families, but publishing in all places of

concourse a general invitation to any who chose to come on a certain

day, and partake for certain succeeding days of the hospitality of the

dwellers in the castle. Many were the preparations immediately begun for

complying with the invitation. But the noblest of their neighbours

refused to appear; not from pride, but because of the unsuitableness and

carelessness of such a mode. With some of them it was an old condition

in the tenure of their estates, that they should go to no one’s dwelling

except visited in person, and expressly solicited. Others, knowing what

sort of persons would be there, and that, from a certain physical

antipathy, they could scarcely breathe in their company, made up their

minds at once not to go. Yet multitudes, many of them beautiful and

innocent as well as gay, resolved to appear.

Meanwhile the great rooms of the castle were got in readiness--that is,

they proceeded to deface them with decorations; for there was a

solemnity and stateliness about them in their ordinary condition, which

was at once felt to be unsuitable for the light-hearted company so soon

to move about in them with the self-same carelessness with which men

walk abroad within the great heavens and hills and clouds. One day,

while the workmen were busy, the eldest sister, of whom I have already

spoken, happened to enter, she knew not why. Suddenly the great idea of

the mighty halls dawned upon her, and filled her soul. The so-called

decorations vanished from her view, and she felt as if she stood in her

father’s presence. She was at one elevated and humbled. As suddenly the

idea faded and fled, and she beheld but the gaudy festoons and draperies

and paintings which disfigured the grandeur. She wept and sped away. Now

it was too late to interfere, and things must take their course. She

would have been but a Cassandra-prophetess to those who saw but the

pleasure before them. She had not been present when her brother was

imprisoned; and indeed for some days had been so wrapt in her own

business, that she had taken but little heed of anything that was going

on. But they all expected her to show herself when the company was

gathered; and they had applied to her for advice at various times during

their operations.

At length the expected hour arrived, and the company began to assemble.

It was a warm summer evening. The dark lake reflected the rose-coloured

clouds in the west, and through the flush rowed many gaily painted

boats, with various coloured flags, towards the massy rock on which the

castle stood. The trees and flowers seemed already asleep, and breathing

forth their sweet dream-breath. Laughter and low voices rose from the

breast of the lake to the ears of the youths and maidens looking forth

expectant from the lofty windows. They went down to the broad platform

at the top of the stairs in front of the door to receive their visitors.

By degrees the festivities of the evening commenced. The same smiles

flew forth both at eyes and lips, darting like beams through the

gathering crowd. Music, from unseen sources, now rolled in billows, now

crept in ripples through the sea of air that filled the lofty rooms. And

in the dancing halls, when hand took hand, and form and motion were

moulded and swayed by the indwelling music, it governed not these alone,

but, as the ruling spirit of the place, every new burst of music for a

new dance swept before it a new and accordant odour, and dyed the flames

that glowed in the lofty lamps with a new and accordant stain. The

floors bent beneath the feet of the time-keeping dancers. But twice in

the evening some of the inmates started, and the pallor occasionally

common to the household overspread their faces, for they felt underneath

them a counter-motion to the dance, as if the floor rose slightly to

answer their feet. And all the time their brother lay below in the

dungeon, like John the Baptist in the castle of Herod, when the lords

and captains sat around, and the daughter of Herodias danced before

them. Outside, all around the castle, brooded the dark night unheeded;

for the clouds had come up from all sides, and were crowding together

overhead. In the unfrequent pauses of the music, they might have heard,

now and then, the gusty rush of a lonely wind, coming and going no one

could know whence or whither, born and dying unexpected and unregarded.

But when the festivities were at their height, when the external and

passing confidence which is produced between superficial natures by a

common pleasure was at the full, a sudden crash of thunder quelled the

music, as the thunder quells the noise of the uplifted sea. The windows

were driven in, and torrents of rain, carried in the folds of a rushing

wind, poured into the halls. The lights were swept away; and the great

rooms, now dark within, were darkened yet more by the dazzling shoots of

flame from the vault of blackness overhead. Those that ventured to look

out of the windows saw, in the blue brilliancy of the quick-following

jets of lightning, the lake at the foot of the rock, ordinarily so still

and so dark, lighted up, not on the surface only, but down to half its

depth; so that, as it tossed in the wind, like a tortured sea of

writhing flames, or incandescent half-molten serpents of brass, they

could not tell whether a strong phosphorescence did not issue from the

transparent body of the waters, as if earth and sky lightened together,

one consenting source of flaming utterance.

Sad was the condition of the late plastic mass of living form that had

flowed into shape at the will and law of the music. Broken into

individuals, the common transfusing spirit withdrawn, they stood

drenched, cold, and benumbed, with clinging garments; light, order,

harmony, purpose departed, and chaos restored; the issuings of life

turned back on their sources, chilly and dead. And in every heart

reigned the falsest of despairing convictions, that this was the only

reality, and that was but a dream. The eldest sister stood with clasped

hands and down-bent head, shivering and speechless, as if waiting for

something to follow. Nor did she wait long. A terrible flash and

thunder-peal made the castle rock; and in the pausing silence that

followed, her quick sense heard the rattling of a chain far off, deep

down; and soon the sound of heavy footsteps, accompanied with the

clanking of iron, reached her ear. She felt that her brother was at

hand. Even in the darkness, and amidst the bellowing of another

deep-bosomed cloud-monster, she knew that he had entered the room. A

moment after, a continuous pulsation of angry blue light began, which,

lasting for some moments, revealed him standing amidst them, gaunt,

haggard, and motionless; his hair and beard untrimmed, his face ghastly,

his eyes large and hollow. The light seemed to gather around him as a

centre. Indeed some believed that it throbbed and radiated from his

person, and not from the stormy heavens above them. The lightning had

rent the wall of his prison, and released the iron staple of his chain,

which he had wound about him like a girdle. In his hand he carried an

iron fetter-bar, which he had found on the floor of the vault. More

terrified at his aspect than at all the violence of the storm, the

visitors, with many a shriek and cry, rushed out into the tempestuous

night. By degrees, the storm died away. Its last flash revealed the

forms of the brothers and sisters lying prostrate, with their faces on

the floor, and that fearful shape standing motionless amidst them still.

Morning dawned, and there they lay, and there he stood. But at a word

from him, they arose and went about their various duties, though

listlessly enough. The eldest sister was the last to rise; and when she

did, it was only by a terrible effort that she was able to reach her

room, where she fell again on the floor. There she remained lying for

days. The brother caused the doors of the great suite of rooms to be

closed, leaving them just as they were, with all the childish adornment

scattered about, and the rain still falling in through the shattered

windows. “Thus let them lie,” said he, “till the rain and frost have

cleansed them of paint and drapery: no storm can hurt the pillars and

arches of these halls.”

The hours of this day went heavily. The storm was gone, but the rain was

left; the passion had departed, but the tears remained behind. Dull and

dark the low misty clouds brooded over the castle and the lake, and shut

out all the neighbourhood. Even if they had climbed to the loftiest

known turret, they would have found it swathed in a garment of clinging

vapour, affording no refreshment to the eye, and no hope to the heart.

There was one lofty tower that rose sheer a hundred feet above the rest,

and from which the fog could have been seen lying in a grey mass

beneath; but that tower they had not yet discovered, nor another close

beside it, the top of which was never seen, nor could be, for the

highest clouds of heaven clustered continually around it. The rain fell

continuously, though not heavily, without; and within, too, there were

clouds from which dropped the tears which are the rain of the spirit.

All the good of life seemed for the time departed, and their souls lived

but as leafless trees that had forgotten the joy of the summer, and whom

no wind prophetic of spring had yet visited. They moved about

mechanically, and had not strength enough left to wish to die.

The next day the clouds were higher, and a little wind blew through such

loopholes in the turrets as the false improvements of the inmates had

not yet filled with glass, shutting out, as the storm, so the serene

visitings of the heavens. Throughout the day, the brother took various

opportunities of addressing a gentle command, now to one and now to

another of his family. It was obeyed in silence. The wind blew fresher

through the loopholes and the shattered windows of the great rooms, and

found its way, by unknown passages, to faces and eyes hot with weeping.

It cooled and blessed them.--When the sun arose the next day, it was in

a clear sky.

By degrees, everything fell into the regularity of subordination. With

the subordination came increase of freedom. The steps of the more

youthful of the family were heard on the stairs and in the corridors

more light and quick than ever before. Their brother had lost the

terrors of aspect produced by his confinement, and his commands were

issued more gently, and oftener with a smile, than in all their previous

history. By degrees his presence was universally felt through the house.

It was no surprise to any one at his studies, to see him by his side

when he lifted up his eyes, though he had not before known that he was

in the room. And although some dread still remained, it was rapidly

vanishing before the advances of a firm friendship. Without immediately

ordering their labours, he always influenced them, and often altered

their direction and objects. The change soon evident in the household

was remarkable. A simpler, nobler expression was visible on all the

countenances. The voices of the men were deeper, and yet seemed by their

very depth more feminine than before; while the voices of the women were

softer and sweeter, and at the same time more full and decided. Now the

eyes had often an expression as if their sight was absorbed in the gaze

of the inward eyes; and when the eyes of two met, there passed between

those eyes the utterance of a conviction that both meant the same thing.

But the change was, of course, to be seen more clearly, though not more

evidently, in individuals.

One of the brothers, for instance, was very fond of astronomy. He had

his observatory on a lofty tower, which stood pretty clear of the

others, towards the north and east. But hitherto, his astronomy, as he

had called it, had been more of the character of astrology. Often, too,

he might have been seen directing a heaven-searching telescope to catch

the rapid transit of a fiery shooting-star, belonging altogether to the

earthly atmosphere, and not to the serene heavens. He had to learn that

the signs of the air are not the signs of the skies. Nay, once, his

brother surprised him in the act of examining through his longest tube a

patch of burning heath upon a distant hill. But now he was diligent from

morning till night in the study of the laws of the truth that has to do

with stars; and when the curtain of the sunlight was about to rise from

before the heavenly worlds which it had hidden all day long, he might be

seen preparing his instruments with that solemn countenance with which

it becometh one to look into the mysterious harmonies of Nature. Now he

learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean;

how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and

freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the

slightest constraint. Thus he stood on the earth, and looked to the

heavens.

Another, who had been much given to searching out the hollow places and

recesses in the foundations of the castle, and who was often to be found

with compass and ruler working away at a chart of the same which he had

been in process of constructing, now came to the conclusion, that only

by ascending the upper regions of his abode could he become capable of

understanding what lay beneath; and that, in all probability, one clear

prospect, from the top of the highest attainable turret, over the castle

as it lay below, would reveal more of the idea of its internal

construction, than a year spent in wandering through its subterranean

vaults. But the fact was, that the desire to ascend wakening within him

had made him forget what was beneath; and having laid aside his chart

for a time at least, he was now to be met in every quarter of the upper

parts, searching and striving upward, now in one direction, now in

another; and seeking, as he went, the best outlooks into the clear air

of outer realities.

And they began to discover that they were all meditating different

aspects of the same thing; and they brought together their various

discoveries, and recognised the likeness between them; and the one thing

often explained the other, and combining with it helped to a third. They

grew in consequence more and more friendly and loving; so that every now

and then one turned to another and said, as in surprise, “Why, you are

my brother!”--“Why, you are my sister!” And yet they had always known

it.

The change reached to all. One, who lived on the air of sweet sounds,

and who was almost always to be found seated by her harp or some other

instrument, had, till the late storm, been generally merry and playful,

though sometimes sad. But for a long time after that, she was often

found weeping, and playing little simple airs which she had heard in

childhood--backward longings, followed by fresh tears. Before long,

however, a new element manifested itself in her music. It became yet

more wild, and sometimes retained all its sadness, but it was mingled

with anticipation and hope. The past and the future merged in one; and

while memory yet brought the rain-cloud, expectation threw the rainbow

across its bosom--and all was uttered in her music, which rose and

swelled, now to defiance, now to victory; then died in a torrent of

weeping.

As to the eldest sister, it was many days before she recovered from the

shock. At length, one day, her brother came to her, took her by the

hand, led her to an open window, and told her to seat herself by it, and

look out. She did so; but at first saw nothing more than an

unsympathising blaze of sunlight. But as she looked, the horizon widened

out, and the dome of the sky ascended, till the grandeur seized upon her

soul, and she fell on her knees and wept. Now the heavens seemed to bend

lovingly over her, and to stretch out wide cloud-arms to embrace her;

the earth lay like the bosom of an infinite love beneath her, and the

wind kissed her cheek with an odour of roses. She sprang to her feet,

and turned, in an agony of hope, expecting to behold the face of the

father, but there stood only her brother, looking calmly though lovingly

on her emotion. She turned again to the window. On the hilltops rested

the sky: Heaven and Earth were one; and the prophecy awoke in her soul,

that from betwixt them would the steps of the father approach.

Hitherto she had seen but Beauty; now she beheld Truth. Often had she

looked on such clouds as these, and loved the strange ethereal curves

into which the winds moulded them; and had smiled as her little pet

sister told her what curious animals she saw in them, and tried to point

them out to her. Now they were as troops of angels, jubilant over her

new birth, for they sang, in her soul, of beauty, and truth, and love.

She looked down, and her little sister knelt beside her.

She was a curious child, with black, glittering eyes, and dark hair; at

the mercy of every wandering wind; a frolicsome, daring girl, who

laughed more than she smiled. She was generally in attendance on her

sister, and was always finding and bringing her strange things. She

never pulled a primrose, but she knew the haunts of all the orchis

tribe, and brought from them bees and butterflies innumerable, as

offerings to her sister. Curious moths and glow-worms were her greatest

delight; and she loved the stars, because they were like the glow-worms.

But the change had affected her too; for her sister saw that her eyes

had lost their glittering look, and had become more liquid and

transparent. And from that time she often observed that her gaiety was

more gentle, her smile more frequent, her laugh less bell-like; and

although she was as wild as ever, there was more elegance in her

motions, and more music in her voice. And she clung to her sister with

far greater fondness than before.

The land reposed in the embrace of the warm summer days. The clouds of

heaven nestled around the towers of the castle; and the hearts of its

inmates became conscious of a warm atmosphere--of a presence of love.

They began to feel like the children of a household, when the mother is

at home. Their faces and forms grew daily more and more beautiful, till

they wondered as they gazed on each other. As they walked in the gardens

of the castle, or in the country around, they were often visited,

especially the eldest sister, by sounds that no one heard but

themselves, issuing from woods and waters; and by forms of love that

lightened out of flowers, and grass, and great rocks. Now and then the

young children would come in with a slow, stately step, and, with great

eyes that looked as if they would devour all the creation, say that they

had met the father amongst the trees, and that he had kissed them;

“And,” added one of them once, “I grew so big!” But when the others went

out to look, they could see no one. And some said it must have been the

brother, who grew more and more beautiful, and loving, and reverend, and

who had lost all traces of hardness, so that they wondered they could

ever have thought him stern and harsh. But the eldest sister held her

peace, and looked up, and her eyes filled with tears. “Who can tell,”

thought she, “but the little children know more about it than we?”

Often, at sunrise, might be heard their hymn of praise to their unseen

father, whom they felt to be near, though they saw him not. Some words

thereof once reached my ear through the folds of the music in which they

floated, as in an upward snowstorm of sweet sounds. And these are some

of the words I heard--but there was much I seemed to hear which I could

not understand, and some things which I understood but cannot utter

again.

“We thank thee that we have a father, and not a maker; that thou hast

begotten us, and not moulded us as images of clay; that we have come

forth of thy heart, and have not been fashioned by thy hands. It _must_

be so. Only the heart of a father is able to create. We rejoice in it,

and bless thee that we know it. We thank thee for thyself. Be what thou

art--our root and life, our beginning and end, our all in all. Come home

to us. Thou livest; therefore we live. In thy light we see. Thou

art--that is all our song.”

Thus they worship, and love, and wait. Their hope and expectation grow

ever stronger and brighter, that one day, ere long, the Father will show

Himself amongst them, and thenceforth dwell in His own house for

evermore. What was once but an old legend has become the one desire of

their hearts.

And the loftiest hope is the surest of being fulfilled.

THE WOW O’RIVEN

Elsie Scott had let her work fall on her knees, and her hands on her

work, and was looking out of the wide, low window of her room, which was

on one of the ground floors of the village street. Through a gap in the

household shrubbery of fuchsias and myrtles filling the window-sill, one

passing on the foot pavement might get a momentary glimpse of her pale

face, lighted up with two blue eyes, over which some inward trouble had

spread a faint, gauze-like haziness. But almost before her thoughts had

had time to wander back to this trouble, a shout of children’s voices,

at the other end of the street, reached her ear. She listened a moment.

A shadow of displeasure and pain crossed her countenance; and rising

hastily, she betook herself to an inner apartment, and closed the door

behind her.

Meantime the sounds drew nearer; and by and by an old man, whose strange

appearance and dress showed that he had little capacity either for good

or evil, passed the window. His clothes were comfortable enough in

quality and condition, for they were the annual gift of a benevolent

lady in the neighbourhood; but, being made to accommodate his taste,

both known and traditional, they were somewhat peculiar in cut and

adornment. Both coat and trousers were of a dark grey cloth; but the

former, which, in its shape, partook of the military, had a straight

collar of yellow, and narrow cuffs of the same; while upon both sleeves,

about the place where a corporal wears his stripes, was expressed, in

the same yellow cloth, a somewhat singular device. It was as close an

imitation of a bell, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, as the

tailor’s skill could produce from a single piece of cloth. The origin of

the military cut of his coat was well known. His preference for it arose

in the time of the wars of the first Napoleon, when the threatened

invasion of the country caused the organisation of many volunteer

regiments. The martial show and exercises captivated the poor man’s

fancy; and from that time forward nothing pleased his vanity, and

consequently conciliated his goodwill more, than to style him by his

favourite title--the _Colonel_. But the badge on his arm had a deeper

origin, which will be partially manifest in the course of the story--if

story it can be called. It was, indeed, the baptism of the fool, the

outward and visible sign of his relation to the infinite and unseen. His

countenance, however, although the features were not of any peculiarly

low or animal type, showed no corresponding sign of the consciousness of

such a relation, being as vacant as human countenance could well be.

The cause of Elsie’s annoyance was that the fool was annoyed; he was

followed by a troop of boys, who turned his rank into scorn, and

assailed him with epithets hateful to him. Although the most harmless of

creatures when left alone, he was dangerous when roused; and now he

stooped repeatedly to pick up stones and hurl them at his tormentors,

who took care, while abusing him, to keep at a considerable distance,

lest he should get hold of them. Amidst the sounds of derision that

followed him, might be heard the words frequently repeated--“_Come hame,

come hame_.” But in a few minutes the noise ceased, either from the

interference of some friendly inhabitant, or that the boys grew weary,

and departed in search of other amusement. By and by, Elsie might be

seen again at her work in the window; but the cloud over her eyes was

deeper, and her whole face more sad.

Indeed, so much did the persecution of this poor man affect her, that an

onlooker would have been compelled to seek the cause in some yet deeper

sympathy than that commonly felt for the oppressed, even by women. And

such a sympathy existed, strange as it may seem, between the beautiful

girl (for many called her _a bonnie lassie_) and this “tatter of

humanity”. Nothing would have been farther from the thoughts of those

that knew them, than the supposition of any correspondence or connection

between them; yet this sympathy sprang in part from a real similarity in

their history and present condition.

All the facts that were known about _Feel Jock’s_ origin were these:

that seventy years ago, a man who had gone with his horse and cart some

miles from the village, to fetch home a load of peat from a desolate

_moss_, had heard, while toiling along as rough a road on as lonely a

hillside as any in Scotland, the cry of a child; and, searching about,

had found the infant, hardly wrapt in rags, and untended, as if the

earth herself had just given birth--that desert moor, wide and dismal,

broken and watery, the only bosom for him to lie upon, and the cold,

clear night-heaven his only covering. The man had brought him home, and

the parish had taken parish-care of him. He had grown up, and proved

what he now was--almost an idiot. Many of the townspeople were kind to

him, and employed him in fetching water for them from the river or wells

in the neighbourhood, paying him for his trouble in victuals, or whisky,

of which he was very fond. He seldom spoke; and the sentences he could

utter were few; yet the tone, and even the words of his limited

vocabulary, were sufficient to express gratitude and some measure of

love towards those who were kind to him, and hatred of those who teased

and insulted him. He lived a life without aim, and apparently to no

purpose; in this resembling most of his more gifted fellow-men, who,

with all the tools and materials necessary for building a noble mansion,

are yet content with a clay hut.

Elsie, on the contrary, had been born in a comfortable farmhouse, amidst

homeliness and abundance. But at a very early age she had lost both

father and mother; not so early, however, but that she had faint

memories of warm soft times on her mother’s bosom, and of refuge in her

mother’s arms from the attacks of geese, and the pursuit of pigs.

Therefore, in after-times, when she looked forward to heaven, it was as

much a reverting to the old heavenly times of childhood and mother’s

love, as an anticipation of something yet to be revealed. Indeed,

without some such memory, how should we ever picture to ourselves a

perfect rest? But sometimes it would seem as if the more a heart was

made capable of loving, the less it had to love; and poor Elsie, in

passing from a mother’s to a brother’s guardianship, felt a change of

spiritual temperature too keen. He was not a bad man, or incapable of

benevolence when touched by the sight of want in anything of which he

would himself have felt the privation; but he was so coarsely made that

only the purest animal necessities affected him, and a hard word, or

unfeeling speech, could never have reached the quick of his nature

through the hide that enclosed it. Elsie, on the contrary, was

excessively and painfully sensitive, as if her nature constantly

portended an invisible multitude of half-spiritual, half-nervous

antenna, which shrank and trembled in every current of air at all below

their own temperature. The effect of this upon her behaviour was such

that she was called odd; and the poor girl felt she was not like other

people, yet could not help it. Her brother, too, laughed at her without

the slightest idea of the pain he occasioned, or the remotest feeling of

curiosity as to what the inward and consistent causes of the outward

abnormal condition might be. Tenderness was the divine comforting she

needed; and it was altogether absent from her brother’s character and

behaviour.

Her neighbours looked on her with some interest, but they rather shunned

than courted her acquaintance; especially after the return of certain

nervous attacks, to which she had been subject in childhood, and which

were again brought on by the events I must relate. It is curious how

certain diseases repel, by a kind of awe, the sympathies of the

neighbours: as if, by the fact of being subject to them, the patient

were removed into another realm of existence, from which, like the dead

with the living, she can hold communion with those around her only

partially, and with a mixture of dread pervading the intercourse. Thus

some of the deepest, purest wells of spiritual life, are, like those in

old castles, choked up by the decay of the outer walls. But what tended

more than anything, perhaps, to keep up the painful unrest of her soul

(for the beauty of her character was evident in the fact that the

irritation seldom reached her _mind_), was a circumstance at which, in

its present connection, some of my readers will smile, and others feel a

shudder corresponding in kind to that of Elsie.

Her brother was very fond of a rather small, but ferocious-looking

bull-dog, which followed close at his heels, wherever he went, with

hanging head and slouching gait, never leaping or racing about like

other dogs. When in the house, he always lay under his master’s chair.

He seemed to dislike Elsie, and she felt an unspeakable repugnance to

him. Though she never mentioned her aversion, her brother easily saw it

by the way in which she avoided the animal; and attributing it entirely

to fear--which indeed had a great share in the matter--he would cruelly

aggravate it, by telling her stories of the fierce hardihood and

relentless persistency of this kind of animal. He dared not yet further

increase her terror by offering to set the creature upon her, because it

was doubtful whether he might be able to restrain him; but the mental

suffering which he occasioned by this heartless conduct, and for which

he had no sympathy, was as severe as many bodily sufferings to which he

would have been sorry to subject her. Whenever the poor girl happened

inadvertently to pass near the dog, which was seldom, a low growl made

her aware of his proximity, and drove her to a quick retreat. He was, in

fact, the animal impersonation of the animal opposition which she had

continually to endure. Like chooses like; and the bulldog _in_ her

brother made choice of the bull-dog _out of_ him for his companion. So

her day was one of shrinking fear and multiform discomfort.

But a nature capable of so much distress, must of necessity be _capable_

of a corresponding amount of pleasure; and in her case this was manifest

in the fact that sleep and the quiet of her own room restored her

wonderfully. If she were only let alone, a calm mood, filled with images

of pleasure, soon took possession of her mind.

Her acquaintance with the fool had commenced some ten years previous to

the time I write of, when she was quite a little girl, and had come from

the country with her brother, who, having taken a small farm close to

the town, preferred residing in the town to occupying the farmhouse,

which was not comfortable. She looked at first with some terror on his

uncouth appearance, and with much wonderment on his strange dress. This

wonder was heightened by a conversation she overheard one day in the

street, between the fool and a little pale-faced boy, who, approaching

him respectfully, said, “Weel, cornel!” “Weel, laddie!” was the reply.

“Fat dis the wow say, cornel?” “Come hame, come hame!” answered the

_colonel_, with both accent and quantity heaped on the word _hame_. What

the wow could be, she had no idea; only, as the years passed on, the

strange word became in her mind indescribably associated with the

strange shape in yellow cloth on his sleeves. Had she been a native of

the town, she could not have failed to know its import, so familiar was

every one with it, although it did not belong to the local vocabulary;

but, as it was, years passed away before she discovered its meaning. And

when, again and again, the fool, attempting to convey his gratitude for

some kindness she had shown him mumbled over the words--“_The wow o’

Rivven--the wow o’ Rivven,_” the wonder would return as to what could be

the idea associated with them in his mind, but she made no advance

towards their explanation.

That, however, which most attracted her to the old man, was his

persecution by the children. They were to him what the bull-dog was to

her--the constant source of irritation and annoyance. They could hardly

hurt him, nor did he appear to dread other injury from them than insult,

to which, fool though he was, he was keenly alive. Human gadflies that

they were! they sometimes stung him beyond endurance, and he would curse

them in the impotence of his anger. Once or twice Elsie had been so far

carried beyond her constitutional timidity, by sympathy for the distress

of her friend, that she had gone out and talked to the boys--even

scolded them, so that they slunk away ashamed, and began to stand as

much in dread of her as of the clutches of their prey. So she, gentle

and timid to excess, acquired among them the reputation of a termagant.

Popular opinion among children, as among men, is of ten just, but as

often very unjust; for the same manifestations may proceed from opposite

principles; and, therefore, as indices to character, may mislead as

often as enlighten.

Next door to the house in which Elsie resided, dwelt a tradesman and his

wife, who kept an indefinite sort of shop, in which various kinds of

goods were exposed for sale. Their youngest son was about the same age

as Elsie; and while they were rather more than children, and less than

young people, he spent many of his evenings with her, somewhat to the

loss of position in his classes at the parish school. They were, indeed,

much attached to each other; and, peculiarly constituted as Elsie was,

one may imagine what kind of heavenly messenger a companion stronger

than herself must have been to her. In fact, if she could have framed

the undefinable need of her childlike nature into an articulate prayer,

it would have been--“Give me some one to love me stronger than I.” Any

love was helpful, yes, in its degree, saving to her poor troubled soul;

but the hope, as they grew older together, that the powerful, yet

tender-hearted youth, really loved her, and would one day make her his

wife, was like the opening of heavenly eyes of life and love in the

hitherto blank and deathlike face of her existence. But nothing had been

said of love, although they met and parted like lovers.

Doubtless, if the circles of their thought and feeling had continued as

now to intersect each other, there would have been no interruption to

their affection; but the time at length arrived when the old couple,

seeing the rest of their family comfortably settled in life, resolved to

make a gentleman of the youngest; and so sent him from school to

college. The facilities existing in Scotland for providing a

professional training enabled them to educate him as a surgeon. He

parted from Elsie with some regret; but, far less dependent on her than

she was on him, and full of the prospects of the future, he felt none of

that sinking at the heart which seemed to lay her whole nature open to a

fresh inroad of all the terrors and sorrows of her peculiar existence.

No correspondence took place between them. New pursuits and relations,

and the development of his tastes and judgments, entirely altered the

position of poor Elsie in his memory. Having been, during their

intercourse, far less of a man than she of a woman, he had no definite

idea of the place he had occupied in her regard; and in his mind she

receded into the background of the past, without his having any idea

that she would suffer thereby, or that he was unjust towards her; while,

in her thoughts, his image stood in the highest and clearest relief. It

was the centre-point from which and towards which all lines radiated and

converged; and although she could not but be doubtful about the future,

yet there was much hope mingled with her doubts.

But when, at the close of two years, he visited his native village, and

she saw before her, instead of the homely youth who had left her that

winter evening, one who, to her inexperienced eyes, appeared a finished

gentleman, her heart sank within her, as if she had found Nature herself

false in her ripening processes, destroying the beautiful promise of a

former year by changing instead of developing her creations. He spoke

kindly to her, but not cordially. To her ear the voice seemed to come

from a great distance out of the past; and while she looked upon him,

that optical change passed over her vision, which all have experienced

after gazing abstractedly on any object for a time: his form grew very

small, and receded to an immeasurable distance; till, her imagination

mingling with the twilight haze of her senses, she seemed to see him

standing far off on a hill, with the bright horizon of sunset for a

background to his clearly defined figure.

She knew no more till she found herself in bed in the dark; and the

first message that reached her from the outer world was the infernal

growl of the bull-dog from the room below. Next day she saw her lover

walking with two ladies, who would have thought it some degree of

condescension to speak to her; and he passed the house without once

looking towards it.

One who is sufficiently possessed by the demon of nervousness to be glad

of the magnetic influences of a friend’s company in a public promenade,

or of a horse beneath him in passing through a churchyard, will have

some faint idea of how utterly exposed and defenceless poor Elsie now

felt on the crowded thoroughfare of life. And so the insensibility which

had overtaken her, was not the ordinary swoon with which Nature relieves

the overstrained nerves, but the return of the epileptic fits of her

early childhood; and if the condition of the poor girl had been pitiable

before, it was tenfold more so now. Yet she did not complain, but bore

all in silence, though it was evident that her health was giving way.

But now, help came to her from a strange quarter; though many might not

be willing to accord the name of help to that which rather hastened than

retarded the progress of her decline.

She had gone to spend a few of the summer days with a relative in the

country, some miles from her home, if home it could be called. One

evening, towards sunset, she went out for a solitary walk. Passing from

the little garden gate, she went along a bare country road for some

distance, and then, turning aside by a footpath through a thicket of low

trees, she came out in a lonely little churchyard on the hillside.

Hardly knowing whether or not she had intended to go there, she seated

herself on a mound covered with long grass, one of many. Before her

stood the ruins of an old church which was taking centuries to crumble.

Little remained but the gable wall, immensely thick, and covered with

ancient ivy. The rays of the setting sun fell on a mound at its foot,

not green like the rest, but of a rich red-brown in the rosy sunset, and

evidently but newly heaped up. Her eyes, too, rested upon it. Slowly the

sun sank below the near horizon.

As the last brilliant point disappeared, the ivy darkened, and a wind

arose and shook all its leaves, making them look cold and troubled; and

to Elsie’s ear came a low faint sound, as from a far-off bell. But close

beside her--and she started and shivered at the sound--rose a deep,

monotonous, almost sepulchral voice, “_Come hame, come hame! The wow,

the wow_!”

At once she understood the whole. She sat in the churchyard of the

ancient parish church of Ruthven; and when she lifted up her eyes, there

she saw, in the half-ruined belfry, the old bell, all but hidden with

ivy, which the passing wind had roused to utter one sleepy tone; and

there beside her, stood the fool with the bell on his arm; and to him

and to her the _wow o’ Rivven_ said, “_Come hame, come hame_!” Ah, what

did she want in the whole universe of God but a home? And though the

ground beneath was hard, and the sky overhead far and boundless, and the

hillside lonely and companionless, yet somewhere within the visible and

beyond these the outer surface of creation, there might be a home for

her; as round the wintry house the snows lie heaped up cold and white

and dreary all the long _forenight_, while within, beyond the closed

shutters, and giving no glimmer through the thick stone wall, the fires

are blazing joyously, and the voice and laughter of young unfrozen

children are heard, and nothing belongs to winter but the grey hairs on

the heads of the parents, within whose warm hearts childlike voices are

heard, and childlike thoughts move to and fro. The kernel of winter

itself is spring, or a sleeping summer.

It was no wonder that the fool, cast out of the earth on a far more

desolate spot than this, should seek to return within her bosom at this

place of open doors, and should call it _home_. For surely the surface

of the earth had no home for him. The mound at the foot of the gable

contained the body of one who had shown him kindness. He had followed

the funeral that afternoon from the town, and had remained behind with

the bell. Indeed it was his custom, though Elsie had not known it, to

follow every funeral going to this, his favourite churchyard of Ruthven;

and, possibly in imitation of its booming, for it was still tolled at

the funerals, he had given the old bell the name of _the wow_, and had

translated its monotonous clangour into the articulate sounds--_come

hame, come hame_. What precise meaning he attached to the words, it is

impossible to say; but it was evident that the place possessed a strange

attraction for him, drawing him towards it by the cords of some

spiritual magnetism. It is possible that in the mind of the idiot there

may have been some feeling about this churchyard and bell, which, in the

mind of another, would have become a grand poetic thought; a feeling as

if the ghostly old bell hung at the church door of the invisible world,

and ever and anon rung out joyous notes (though they sounded sad in the

ears of the living), calling to the children of the unseen to _come

home, come home_. She sat for some time in silence; for the bell did not

ring again, and the fool spoke no more; till the dews began to fall,

when she rose and went home, followed by her companion, who passed the

night in the barn. From that hour Elsie was furnished with a visual

image of the rest she sought; an image which, mingling with deeper and

holier thoughts, became, like the bow set in the cloud, the earthly

pledge and sign of the fulfilment of heavenly hopes. Often when the

wintry fog of cold discomfort and homelessness filled her soul, all at

once the picture of the little churchyard--with the old gable and

belfry, and the slanting sunlight steeping down to the very roots of the

long grass on the graves--arose in the darkened chamber (_camera

obscura,_) of her soul; and again she heard the faint Aeolian sound of

the bell, and the voice of the prophet-fool who interpreted the oracle;

and the inward weariness was soothed by the promise of a long sleep. Who

can tell how many have been counted fools simply because they were

prophets; or how much of the madness in the world may be the utterance

of thoughts true and just, but belonging to a region differing from ours

in its nature and scenery!

But to Elsie looking out of her window came the mocking tones of the

idle boys who had chosen as the vehicle of their scorn the very words

which showed the relation of the fool to the eternal, and revealed in

him an element higher far than any yet developed in them. They turned

his glory into shame, like the enemies of David when they mocked the

would-be king. And the best in a man is often that which is most

condemned by those who have not attained to his goodness. The words,

however, even as repeated by the boys, had not solely awakened

indignation at the persecution of the old man: they had likewise

comforted her with the thought of the refuge that awaited both him and

her.

But the same evening a worse trial was in store for her. Again she sat

near the window, oppressed by the consciousness that her brother had

come in. He had gone upstairs, and his dog had remained at the door,

exchanging surly compliments with some of his own kind, when the fool

came strolling past, and, I do not know from what cause, the dog flew at

him. Elsie heard his cry and looked up. Her fear of the brute vanished

in a moment before her sympathy for her friend. She darted from the

house, and rushed towards the dog to drag him off the defenceless idiot,

calling him by his name in a tone of anger and dislike. He left the

fool, and, springing at Elsie, seized her by the arm above the elbow

with such a grip that, in the midst of her agony, she fancied she heard

the bone crack. But she uttered no cry, for the most apprehensive are

sometimes the most courageous. Just then, however, her former lover was

coming along the street, and, catching a glimpse of what had happened,

was on the spot in an instant, took the dog by the throat with a gripe

not inferior to his own, and having thus compelled him to relax his

hold, dashed him on the ground with a force that almost stunned him, and

then with a superadded kick sent him away limping and howling; whereupon

the fool, attacking him furiously with a stick, would certainly have

finished him, had not his master descried his plight and come to his

rescue.

Meantime the young surgeon had carried Elsie into the house; for, as

soon as she was rescued from the dog, she had fallen down in one of her

fits, which were becoming more and more frequent of themselves, and

little needed such a shock as this to increase their violence. He was

dressing her arm when she began to recover; and when she opened her

eyes, in a state of half-consciousness, he first object she beheld was

his face bending over her. Recalling nothing of what had occurred, it

seemed to her, in the dreamy condition in which the fit had left her,

the same face, unchanged, which had once shone in upon her tardy

springtime, and promised to ripen it into summer. She forgot it had

departed and left her in the wintry cold. And so she uttered wild words

of love and trust; and the youth, while stung with remorse at his own

neglect, was astonished to perceive the poetic forms of beauty in which

the soul of the uneducated maiden burst into flower. But as her senses

recovered themselves, the face gradually changed to her, as if the slow

alteration of two years had been phantasmagorically compressed into a

few moments; and the glow departed from the maiden’s thoughts and words,

and her soul found itself at the narrow window of the present, from

which she could behold but a dreary country.--From the street came the

iambic cry of the fool, _“Come hame, come hame.”_

Tycho Brahe, I think, is said to have kept a fool, who frequently sat at

his feet in his study, and to whose mutterings he used to listen in the

pauses of his own thought. The shining soul of the astronomer drew forth

the rainbow of harmony from the misty spray of words ascending ever from

the dark gulf into which the thoughts of the idiot were ever falling. He

beheld curious concurrences of words therein; and could read strange

meanings from them--sometimes even received wondrous hints for the

direction of celestial inquiry, from what, to any other, and it may be

to the fool himself, was but a ceaseless and aimless babble. Such power

lieth in words. It is not then to be wondered at, that the sounds I have

mentioned should fall on the ears of Elsie, at such a moment, as a

message from God Himself. This then--all this dreariness--was but a

passing show like the rest, and there lay somewhere for her a reality--a

home. The tears burst up from her oppressed heart. She received the

message, and prepared to go home. From that time her strength gradually

sank, but her spirits as steadily rose.

The strength of the fool, too, began to fail, for he was old. He bore

all the signs of age, even to the grey hairs, which betokened no wisdom.

But one cannot say what wisdom might be in him, or how far he had fought

his own battle, and been victorious. Whether any notion of a continuance

of life and thought dwelt in his brain, it is impossible to tell; but he

seemed to have the idea that this was not his home; and those who saw

him gradually approaching his end, might well anticipate for him a

higher life in the world to come. He had passed through this world

without ever awaking to such a consciousness of being as is common to

mankind. He had spent his years like a weary dream through a long

night--a strange, dismal, unkindly dream; and now the morning was at

hand. Often in his dream had he listened with sleepy senses to the

ringing of the bell, but that bell would awake him at last. He was like

a seed buried too deep in the soil, to which the light has never

penetrated, and which, therefore, has never forced its way upwards to

the open air, ever experienced the resurrection of the dead. But seeds

will grow ages after they have fallen into the earth; and, indeed, with

many kinds, and within some limits, the older the seed before it

germinates, the more plentiful the fruit. And may it not be believed of

many human beings, that, the Great Husbandman having sown them like

seeds in the soil of human affairs, there they lie buried a life long;

and only after the upturning of the soil by death reach a position in

which the awakening of their aspiration and the consequent growth become

possible. Surely He has made nothing in vain.

A violent cold and cough brought him at last near to his end, and

hearing that he was ill, Elsie ventured one bright spring day to go to

see him. When she entered the miserable room where he lay, he held out

his hand to her with something like a smile, and muttered feebly and

painfully, “I’m gaein’ to the wow, nae to come back again.” Elsie could

not restrain her tears; while the old man, looking fixedly at her,

though with meaningless eyes, muttered, for the last time, “_Come hame!

come hame!_” and sank into a lethargy, from which nothing could rouse

him, till, next morning, he was waked by friendly death from the long

sleep of this world’s night. They bore him to his favourite churchyard,

and buried him within the site of the old church, below his loved bell,

which had ever been to him as the cuckoo-note of a coming spring. Thus

he at length obeyed its summons, and went home.

Elsie lingered till the first summer days lay warm on the land. Several

kind hearts in the village, hearing of her illness, visited her and

ministered to her. Wondering at her sweetness and patience, they

regretted they had not known her before. How much consolation might not

their kindness have imparted, and how much might not their sympathy have

strengthened her on her painful road! But they could not long have

delayed her going home. Nor, mentally constituted as she was, would this

have been at all to be desired. Indeed it was chiefly the expectation of

departure that quieted and soothed her tremulous nature. It is true that

a deep spring of hope and faith kept singing on in her heart, but this

alone, without the anticipation of speedy release, could only have kept

her mind at peace. It could not have reached, at least for a long time,

the border land between body and mind, in which her disease lay.

One still night of summer, the nurse who watched by her bedside heard

her murmur through her sleep, “I hear it: _come hame--come hame_. I’m

comin’, I’m comin’--I’m gaein’ hame to the wow, nae to come back.” She

awoke at the sound of her own words, and begged the nurse to convey to

her brother her last request, that she might be buried by the side of

the fool, within the old church of Ruthven. Then she turned her face to

the wall, and in the morning was found quiet and cold. She must have

died within a few minutes after her last words. She was buried according

to her request; and thus she too went home.

Side by side rest the aged fool and the young maiden; for the bell

called them, and they obeyed; and surely they found the fire burning

bright, and heard friendly voices, and felt sweet lips on theirs, in the

home to which they went. Surely both intellect and love were waiting

them there.

Still the old bell hangs in the old gable; and whenever another is borne

to the old churchyard, it keeps calling to those who are left behind,

with the same sad, but friendly and unchanging voice--_“Come hame! come

hame! come hame!”_

“Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself:

for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy

mourning shall be ended.”--ISA. LX 20.

THE BROKEN SWORDS

The eyes of three, two sisters and a brother, gazed for the last time on

a great pale-golden star, that followed the sun down the steep west. It

went down to arise again; and the brother about to depart might return,

but more than the usual doubt hung upon his future. For between the

white dresses of the sisters, shone his scarlet coat and golden

sword-knot, which he had put on for the first time, more to gratify

their pride than his own vanity. The brightening moon, as if prophetic

of a future memory, had already begun to dim the scarlet and the gold,

and to give them a pale, ghostly hue. In her thoughtful light the whole

group seemed more like a meeting in the land of shadows, than a parting

in the substantial earth. But which should be called the land of

realities?--the region where appearance, and space, and time drive

between, and stop the flowing currents of the soul’s speech? or that

region where heart meets heart, and appearance has become the slave to

utterance, and space and time are forgotten?

Through the quiet air came the far-off rush of water, and the near cry

of the land-rail. Now and then a chilly wind blew unheeded through the

startled and jostling leaves that shaded the ivy-seat. Else, there was

calm everywhere, rendered yet deeper and more intense by the dusky

sorrow that filled their hearts. For, far away, hundreds of miles beyond

the hearing of their ears, roared the great war-guns; next week their

brother must sail with his regiment to join the army; and tomorrow he

must leave his home.

The sisters looked on him tenderly, with vague fears about his fate. Yet

little they divined it. That the face they loved might lie pale and

bloody, in a heap of slain, was the worst image of it that arose before

them; but this, had they seen the future, they would, in ignorance of

the further future, have infinitely preferred to that which awaited him.

And even while they looked on him, a dim feeling of the unsuitableness

of his lot filled their minds. For, indeed, to all judgments it must

have seemed unsuitable that the home-boy, the loved of his mother, the

pet of his sisters, who was happy womanlike (as Coleridge says), if he

possessed the signs of love, having never yet sought for its

proofs--that he should be sent amongst soldiers, to command and be

commanded; to kill, or perhaps to be himself crushed out of the fair

earth in the uproar that brings back for the moment the reign of Night

and Chaos. No wonder that to his sisters it seemed strange and sad. Yet

such was their own position in the battle of life, in which their father

had died with doubtful conquest, that when their old military uncle sent

the boy an ensign’s commission, they did not dream of refusing the only

path open, as they thought, to an honourable profession, even though it

might lead to the trench-grave. They heard it as the voice of destiny,

wept, and yielded.

If they had possessed a deeper insight into his character, they would

have discovered yet further reason to doubt the fitness of the

profession chosen for him; and if they had ever seen him at school, it

is possible the doubt of fitness might have strengthened into a

certainty of incongruity. His comparative inactivity amongst his

schoolfellows, though occasioned by no dulness of intellect, might have

suggested the necessity of a quiet life, if inclination and liking had

been the arbiters in the choice. Nor was this inactivity the result of

defective animal spirits either, for sometimes his mirth and boyish

frolic were unbounded; but it seemed to proceed from an over-activity of

the inward life, absorbing, and in some measure checking, the outward

manifestation. He had so much to do in his own hidden kingdom, that he

had not time to take his place in the polity and strife of the

commonwealth around him. Hence, while other boys were acting, he was

thinking. In this point of difference, he felt keenly the superiority of

many of his companions; for another boy would have the obstacle

overcome, or the adversary subdued, while he was meditating on the

propriety, or on the means, of effecting the desired end. He envied

their promptitude, while they never saw reason to envy his wisdom; for

his conscience, tender and not strong, frequently transformed slowness

of determination into irresolution: while a delicacy of the sympathetic

nerves tended to distract him from any predetermined course, by the

diversity of their vibrations, responsive to influences from all

quarters, and destructive to unity of purpose.

Of such a one, the _a priori_ judgment would be, that he ought to be

left to meditate and grow for some time, before being called upon to

produce the fruits of action. But add to these mental conditions a vivid

imagination, and a high sense of honour, nourished in childhood by the

reading of the old knightly romances, and then put the youth in a

position in which action is imperative, and you have elements of strife

sufficient to reduce that fair kingdom of his to utter anarchy and

madness. Yet so little, do we know ourselves, and so different are the

symbols with which the imagination works its algebra, from the realities

which those symbols represent, that as yet the youth felt no uneasiness,

but contemplated his new calling with a glad enthusiasm and some vanity;

for all his prospect lay in the glow of the scarlet and the gold. Nor

did this excitement receive any check till the day before his departure,

on which day I have introduced him to my readers, when, accidently

taking up a newspaper of a week old, his eye fell on these

words--“_Already crying women are to be met in the streets_.” With this

cloud afar on his horizon, which, though no bigger than a man’s hand,

yet cast a perceptible shadow over his mind, he departed next morning.

The coach carried him beyond the consecrated circle of home laws and

impulses, out into the great tumult, above which rises ever and anon the

cry of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Every tragedy of higher order, constructed in Christian times, will

correspond more or less to the grand drama of the Bible; wherein the

first act opens with a brilliant sunset vision of Paradise, in which

childish sense and need are served with all the profusion of the

indulgent nurse. But the glory fades off into grey and black, and night

settles down upon the heart which, rightly uncontent with the childish,

and not having yet learned the childlike, seeks knowledge and manhood as

a thing denied by the Maker, and yet to be gained by the creature; so

sets forth alone to climb the heavens, and instead of climbing, falls

into the abyss. Then follows the long dismal night of feverish efforts

and delirious visions, or, it may be, helpless despair; till at length a

deeper stratum of the soul is heaved to the surface; and amid the first

dawn of morning, the youth says within him, “I have sinned against my

_Maker_--I will arise and go to my _Father_.” More or less, I say, will

Christian tragedy correspond to this--a fall and a rising again; not a

rising only, but a victory; not a victory merely, but a triumph. Such,

in its way and degree, is my story. I have shown, in one passing scene,

the home paradise; now I have to show a scene of a far differing nature.

The young ensign was lying in his tent, weary, but wakeful. All day long

the cannon had been bellowing against the walls of the city, which now

lay with wide, gaping breach, ready for the morrow’s storm, but covered

yet with the friendly darkness. His regiment was ordered to be ready

with the earliest dawn to march up to the breach. That day, for the

first time, there had been blood on his sword--there the sword lay, a

spot on the chased hilt still. He had cut down one of the enemy in a

skirmish with a sally party of the besieged and the look of the man as

he fell, haunted him. He felt, for the time, that he dared not pray to

the Father, for the blood of a brother had rushed forth at the stroke of

his arm, and there was one fewer of living souls on the earth because he

lived thereon. And to-morrow he must lead a troop of men up to that poor

disabled town, and turn them loose upon it, not knowing what might

follow in the triumph of enraged and victorious foes, who for weeks had

been subjected, by the constancy of the place, to the greatest

privations. It was true the general had issued his commands against all

disorder and pillage; but if the soldiers once yielded to temptation,

what might not be done before the officers could reclaim them! All the

wretched tales he had read of the sack of cities rushed back on his

memory. He shuddered as he lay. Then his conscience began to speak, and

to ask what right he had to be there.--Was the war a just one?--He could

not tell; for this was a bad time for settling nice questions. But there

he was, right or wrong, fighting and shedding blood on God’s earth,

beneath God’s heaven.

Over and over he turned the question in his mind; again and again the

spouting blood of his foe, and the death-look in his eye, rose before

him; and the youth who at school could never fight with a companion

because he was not sure that he was in the right, was alone in the midst

of undoubting men of war, amongst whom he was driven helplessly along,

upon the waves of a terrible necessity. What wonder that in the midst of

these perplexities his courage should fail him! What wonder that the

consciousness of fainting should increase the faintness! or that the

dread of fear and its consequences should hasten and invigorate its

attacks! To crown all, when he dropped into a troubled slumber at

length, he found himself hurried, as on a storm of fire, through the

streets of the captured town, from all the windows of which looked forth

familiar faces, old and young, but distorted from the memory of his

boyhood by fear and wild despair. On one spot lay the body of his

father, with his face to the earth; and he woke at the cry of horror and

rage that burst from his own lips, as he saw the rough, bloody hand of a

soldier twisted in the loose hair of his elder sister, and the younger

fainting in the arms of a scoundrel belonging to his own regiment. He

slept no more. As the grey morning broke, the troops appointed for the

attack assembled without sound of trumpet or drum, and were silently

formed in fitting order. The young ensign was in his place, weary and

wretched after his miserable night. Before him he saw a great,

broad-shouldered lieutenant, whose brawny hand seemed almost too large

for his sword-hilt, and in any one of whose limbs played more animal

life than in the whole body of the pale youth. The firm-set lips of this

officer, and the fire of his eye, showed a concentrated resolution,

which, by the contrast, increased the misery of the ensign, and seemed,

as if the stronger absorbed the weaker, to draw out from him the last

fibres of self-possession: the sight of unattainable determination,

while it increased the feeling of the arduousness of that which required

such determination, threw him into the great gulf which lay between him

and it. In this disorder of his nervous and mental condition, with a

doubting conscience and a shrinking heart, is it any wonder that the

terrors which lay before him at the gap in those bristling walls, should

draw near, and, making sudden inroad upon his soul, overwhelm the

government of a will worn out by the tortures of an unassured spirit?

What share fear contributed to unman him, it was impossible for him, in

the dark, confused conflict of differing emotions, to determine; but

doubtless a natural shrinking from danger, there being no excitement to

deaden its influence, and no hope of victory to encourage to the

struggle, seeing victory was dreadful to him as defeat, had its part in

the sad result. Many men who have courage, are dependent on ignorance

and a low state of the moral feeling for that courage; and a further

progress towards the development of the higher nature would, for a time

at least, entirely overthrow it. Nor could such loss of courage be

rightly designated by the name of cowardice. But, alas! the colonel

happened to fix his eyes upon him as he passed along the file; and this

completed his confusion. He betrayed such evident symptoms of

perturbation, that that officer ordered him under arrest; and the result

was, that, chiefly for the sake of example to the army, he was, upon

trial by court-martial, expelled from the service, and had his sword

broken over his head. Alas for the delicate minded youth! Alas for the

home-darling!

Long after, he found at the bottom of his chest the pieces of the broken

sword, and remembered that, at the time, he had lifted them from the

ground and carried them away. But he could not recall under what impulse

he had done so. Perhaps the agony he suffered, passing the bounds of

mortal endurance, had opened for him a vista into the eternal, and had

shown him, if not the injustice of the sentence passed upon him, yet his

freedom from blame, or, endowing him with dim prophetic vision, had

given him the assurance that some day the stain would be wiped from his

soul, and leave him standing clear before the tribunal of his own

honour. Some feeling like this, I say, may have caused him, with a

passing gleam of indignant protest, to lift the fragments from the

earth, and carry them away; even as the friends of a so-called traitor

may bear away his mutilated body from the wheel. But if such was the

case, the vision was soon overwhelmed and forgotten in the succeeding

anguish. He could not see that, in mercy to his doubting spirit, the

question which had agitated his mind almost to madness, and which no

results of the impending conflict could have settled for him, was thus

quietly set aside for the time; nor that, painful as was the dark,

dreadful existence that he was now to pass in self-torment and moaning,

it would go by, and leave his spirit clearer far, than if, in his

apprehension, it had been stained with further blood-guiltiness, instead

of the loss of honour. Years after, when he accidentally learned that on

that very morning the whole of his company, with parts of several more,

had, or ever they began to mount the breach, been blown to pieces by the

explosion of a mine, he cried aloud in bitterness, “Would God that my

fear had not been discovered before I reached that spot!” But surely it

is better to pass into the next region of life having reaped some

assurance, some firmness of character, determination of effort, and

consciousness of the worth of life, in the present world; so approaching

the future steadily and faithfully, and if in much darkness and

ignorance, yet not in the oscillations of moral uncertainty.

Close upon the catastrophe followed a torpor, which lasted he did not

know how long, and which wrapped in a thick fog all the succeeding

events. For some time he can hardly be said to have had any conscious

history. He awoke to life and torture when half-way across the sea

towards his native country, where was no home any longer for him. To

this point, and no farther, could his thoughts return in after years.

But the misery which he then endured is hardly to be understood, save by

those of like delicate temperament with himself. All day long he sat

silent in his cabin; nor could any effort of the captain, or others on

board, induce him to go on deck till night came on, when, under the

starlight, he ventured into the open air. The sky soothed him then, he

knew not how. For the face of nature is the face of God, and must bear

expressions that can influence, though unconsciously to them, the most

ignorant and hopeless of His children. Often did he watch the clouds in

hope of a storm, his spirit rising and falling as the sky darkened or

cleared; he longed, in the necessary selfishness of such suffering, for

a tumult of waters to swallow the vessel; and only the recollection of

how many lives were involved in its safety besides his own, prevented

him from praying to God for lightning and tempest, borne on which he

might dash into the haven of the other world. One night, following a

sultry calm day, he thought that Mercy had heard his unuttered prayer.

The air and sea were intense darkness, till a light as intense for one

moment annihilated it, and the succeeding darkness seemed shattered with

the sharp reports of the thunder that cracked without reverberation. He

who had shrunk from battle with his fellow-men, rushed to the mainmast,

threw himself on his knees, and stretched forth his arms in speechless

energy of supplication; but the storm passed away overhead, and left him

kneeling still by the uninjured mast. At length the vessel reached her

port. He hurried on shore to bury himself in the most secret place he

could find. _Out of sight_ was his first, his only thought. Return to

his mother he would not, he could not; and, indeed, his friends never

learned his fate, until it had carried him far beyond their reach.

For several weeks he lurked about like a malefactor, in low

lodging-houses in narrow streets of the seaport to which the vessel had

borne him, heeding no one, and but little shocked at the strange society

and conversation with which, though only in bodily presence, he had to

mingle. These formed the subjects of reflection in after times; and he

came to the conclusion that, though much evil and much misery exist,

sufficient to move prayers and tears in those who love their kind, yet

there is less of both than those looking down from a more elevated

social position upon the weltering heap of humanity, are ready to

imagine; especially if they regard it likewise from the pedestal of

self-congratulation on which a meagre type of religion has elevated

them. But at length his little stock of money was nearly expended, and

there was nothing that he could do, or learn to do, in this seaport. He

felt impelled to seek manual labour, partly because he thought it more

likely he could obtain that sort of employment, without a request for

reference as to his character, which would lead to inquiry about his

previous history; and partly, perhaps, from an instinctive feeling that

hard bodily labour would tend to lessen his inward suffering.

He left the town, therefore, at nightfall of a July day, carrying a

little bundle of linen, and the remains of his money, somewhat augmented

by the sale of various articles of clothing and convenience, which his

change of life rendered superfluous and unsuitable. He directed his

course northwards, travelling principally by night--so painfully did he

shrink from the gaze even of foot-farers like himself; and sleeping

during the day in some hidden nook of wood or thicket, or under the

shadow of a great tree in a solitary field. So fine was the season, that

for three successive weeks he was able to travel thus without

inconvenience, lying down when the sun grew hot in the forenoon, and

generally waking when the first faint stars were hesitating in the great

darkening heavens that covered and shielded him. For above every cloud,

above every storm, rise up, calm, clear, divine, the deep infinite

skies; they embrace the tempest even as the sunshine; by their

permission it exists within their boundless peace: therefore it cannot

hurt, and must pass away, while there they stand as ever, domed up

eternally, lasting, strong, and pure.

Several times he attempted to get agricultural employment; but the

whiteness of his hands and the tone of his voice not merely suggested

unfitness for labour, but generated suspicion as to the character of one

who had evidently dropped from a rank so much higher, and was seeking

admittance within the natural masonic boundaries and secrets and

privileges of another. Disheartened somewhat, but hopeful, he journeyed

on. I say hopeful; for the blessed power of life in the universe in

fresh air and sunshine absorbed by active exercise, in winds, yea in

rain, though it fell but seldom, had begun to work its natural healing,

soothing effect, upon his perturbed spirit. And there was room for hope

in his new endeavour. As his bodily strength increased, and his health,

considerably impaired by inward suffering, improved, the trouble of his

soul became more endurable--and in some measure to endure is to conquer

and destroy. In proportion as the mind grows in the strength of

patience, the disturber of its peace sickens and fades away. At length,

one day, a widow lady in a village through which his road led him, gave

him a day’s work in her garden. He laboured hard and well,

notwithstanding his soon-blistered hands, received his wages thankfully,

and found a resting-place for the night on the low part of a haystack

from which the upper portion had been cut away. Here he ate his supper

of bread and cheese, pleased to have found such comfortable quarters,

and soon fell fast asleep.

When he awoke, the whole heavens and earth seemed to give a full denial

to sin and sorrow. The sun was just mounting over the horizon, looking

up the clear cloud-mottled sky. From millions of water-drops hanging on

the bending stalks of grass, sparkled his rays in varied refraction,

transformed here to a gorgeous burning ruby, there to an emerald, green

as the grass, and yonder to a flashing, sunny topaz. The chanting

priest-lark had gone up from the low earth, as soon as the heavenly

light had begun to enwrap and illumine the folds of its tabernacle; and

had entered the high heavens with his offering, whence, unseen, he now

dropped on the earth the sprinkled sounds of his overflowing

blessedness. The poor youth rose but to kneel, and cry, from a bursting

heart, “Hast Thou not, O Father, some care for me? Canst Thou not

restore my lost honour? Can anything befall Thy children for which Thou

hast no help? Surely, if the face of Thy world lie not, joy and not

grief is at the heart of the universe. Is there none for me?”

The highest poetic feeling of which we are now conscious, springs not

from the beholding of perfected beauty, but from the mute sympathy which

the creation with all its children manifests with us in the groaning and

travailing which look for the sonship. Because of our need and

aspiration, the snowdrop gives birth in our hearts to a loftier

spiritual and poetic feeling, than the rose most complete in form,

colour, and odour. The rose is of Paradise--the snowdrop is of the

striving, hoping, longing Earth. Perhaps our highest poetry is the

expression of our aspirations in the sympathetic forms of visible

nature. Nor is this merely a longing for a restored Paradise; for even

in the ordinary history of men, no man or woman that has fallen, can be

restored to the position formerly held. Such must rise to a yet higher

place, whence they can behold their former standing far beneath their

feet. They must be restored by the attainment of something better than

they ever possessed before, or not at all. If the law be a weariness, we

must escape it by taking refuge with the spirit, for not otherwise can

we fulfil the law than by being above the law. To escape the overhanging

rocks of Sinai, we must climb to its secret top.

“Is thy strait horizon dreary?

Is thy foolish fancy chill?

Change the feet that have grown weary

For the wings that never will.”

Thus, like one of the wandering knights searching the wide earth for the

Sangreal, did he wander on, searching for his lost honour, or rather

(for that he counted gone for ever) seeking unconsciously for the peace

of mind which had departed from him, and taken with it, not the joy

merely, but almost the possibility, of existence.

At last, when his little store was all but exhausted, he was employed by

a market gardener, in the neighbourhood of a large country town, to work

in his garden, and sometimes take his vegetables to market. With him he

continued for a few weeks, and wished for no change; until, one day

driving his cart through the town, he saw approaching him an elderly

gentleman, whom he knew at once, by his gait and carriage, to be a

military man. Now he had never seen his uncle the retired officer, but

it struck him that this might be he; and under the tyranny of his

passion for concealment, he fancied that, if it were he, he might

recognise him by some family likeness--not considering the improbability

of his looking at him. This fancy, with the painful effect which the

sight of an officer, even in plain clothes, had upon him, recalling the

torture of that frightful day, so overcame him, that he found himself at

the other end of an alley before he recollected that he had the horse

and cart in charge. This increased his difficulty; for now he dared not

return, lest his inquiries after the vehicle, if the horse had strayed

from the direct line, should attract attention, and cause interrogations

which he would be unable to answer. The fatal want of self-possession

seemed again to ruin him. He forsook the town by the nearest way, struck

across the country to another line of road, and before he was missed,

was miles away, still in a northerly direction.

But although he thus shunned the face of man, especially of any one who

reminded him of the past, the loss of his reputation in their eyes was

not the cause of his inward grief. That would have been comparatively

powerless to disturb him, had he not lost his own respect. He quailed

before his own thoughts; he was dishonoured in his own eyes. His

perplexity had not yet sufficiently cleared away to allow him to see the

extenuating circumstances of the case; not to say the fact that the

peculiar mental condition in which he was at the time, removed the case

quite out of the class of ordinary instances of cowardice. He condemned

himself more severely than any of his judges would have dared;

remembering that portion of his mental sensations which had savoured of

fear, and forgetting the causes which had produced it. He judged himself

a man stained with the foulest blot that could cleave to a soldier’s

name, a blot which nothing but death, not even death, could efface. But,

inwardly condemned and outwardly degraded, his dread of recognition was

intense; and feeling that he was in more danger of being discovered

where the population was sparser, he resolved to hide himself once more

in the midst of poverty; and, with this view, found his way to one of

the largest of the manufacturing towns.

He reached it during the strike of a great part of the workmen; so that,

though he found some difficulty in procuring employment, as might be

expected from his ignorance of machine-labour, he yet was sooner

successful than he would otherwise have been. Possessed of a natural

aptitude for mechanical operations, he soon became a tolerable workman;

and he found that his previous education assisted to the fitting

execution of those operations even which were most purely mechanical.

He found also, at first, that the unrelaxing attention requisite for the

mastering of the many niceties of his work, of necessity drew his mind

somewhat from its brooding over his misfortune, hitherto almost

ceaseless. Every now and then, however, a pang would shoot suddenly to

his heart, and turn his face pale, even before his consciousness had

time to inquire what was the matter. So by degrees, as attention became

less necessary, and the nervo-mechanical action of his system increased

with use, his thoughts again returned to their old misery. He would wake

at night in his poor room, with the feeling that a ghostly nightmare sat

on his soul; that a want--a loss--miserable, fearful--was present; that

something of his heart was gone from him; and through the darkness he

would hear the snap of the breaking sword, and lie for a moment

overwhelmed beneath the assurance of the incredible fact. Could it be

true that _he_ was a coward? that _his_ honour was gone, and in its

place a stain? that _he_ was a thing for men--and worse, for women--to

point the finger at, laughing bitter laughter? Never lover or husband

could have mourned with the same desolation over the departure of the

loved; the girl alone, weeping scorching tears over _her_ degradation,

could resemble him in his agony, as he lay on his bed, and wept and

moaned.

His sufferings had returned with the greater weight, that he was no

longer upheld by the “divine air” and the open heavens, whose sunlight

now only reached him late in an afternoon, as he stood at his loom,

through windows so coated with dust that they looked like frosted glass;

showing, as it passed through the air to fall on the dirty floor, how

the breath of life was thick with dust of iron and wood, and films of

cotton; amidst which his senses were now too much dulled by custom to

detect the exhalations from greasy wheels and overtasked human-kind. Nor

could he find comfort in the society of his fellow-labourers. True, it

was a kind of comfort to have those near him who could not know of his

grief; but there was so little in common between them, that any

interchange of thought was impossible. At least, so it seemed to him.

Yet sometimes his longing for human companionship would drive him out

of his dreary room at night, and send him wandering through the lower

part of the town, where he would gaze wistfully on the miserable faces

that passed him, as if looking for some one--some angel, even there--to

speak goodwill to his hungry heart.

Once he entered one of those gin-palaces, which, like the golden gates

of hell, entice the miserable to worse misery, and seated himself close

to a half-tipsy, good-natured wretch, who made room for him on a bench

by the wall. He was comforted even by this proximity to one who would

not repel him. But soon the paintings of warlike action--of knights, and

horses, and mighty deeds done with battle-axe, and broad-sword, which

adorned the--panels all round, drove him forth even from this heaven of

the damned; yet not before the impious thought had arisen in his heart,

that the brilliantly painted and sculptural roof, with the gilded

vine-leaves and bunches of grapes trained up the windows, all lighted

with the great shining chandeliers, was only a microcosmic repetition of

the bright heavens and the glowing earth, that overhung and surrounded

the misery of man. But the memory of how kindly they had comforted and

elevated him, at one period of his painful history, not only banished

the wicked thought, but brought him more quiet, in the resurrection of a

past blessing, than he had known for some time. The period, however, was

now at hand when a new grief, followed by a new and more elevated

activity, was to do its part towards the closing up of the fountain of

bitterness.

Amongst his fellow-labourers, he had for a short time taken some

interest in observing a young woman, who had lately joined them. There

was nothing remarkable about her, except what at first sight seemed a

remarkable plainness. A slight scar over one of her rather prominent

eyebrows, increased this impression of plainness. But the first day had

not passed, before he began to see that there was something not

altogether common in those deep eyes; and the plain look vanished before

a closer observation, which also discovered, in the forehead and the

lines of the mouth, traces of sorrow or other suffering. There was an

expression, too, in the whole face, of fixedness of purpose, without any

hardness of determination. Her countenance altogether seemed the index

to an interesting mental history. Signs of mental trouble were always an

attraction to him; in this case so great, that he overcame his shyness,

and spoke to her one evening as they left the works. He often walked

home with her after that; as, indeed, was natural, seeing that she

occupied an attic in the same poor lodging-house in which he lived

himself. The street did not bear the best character; nor, indeed, would

the occupations of all the inmates of the house have stood

investigation; but so retiring and quiet was this girl, and so seldom

did she go abroad after work hours, that he had not discovered till then

that she lived in the same street, not to say the same house with

himself.

He soon learned her history--a very common one as outward events, but

not surely insignificant because common. Her father and mother were both

dead, and hence she had to find her livelihood alone, and amidst

associations which were always disagreeable, and sometimes painful. Her

quick womanly instinct must have discovered that he too had a history;

for though, his mental prostration favouring the operation of outward

influences, he had greatly approximated in appearance to those amongst

whom he laboured, there were yet signs, besides the educated accent of

his speech, which would have distinguished him to an observer; but she

put no questions to him, nor made any approach towards seeking a return

of the confidence she reposed in him. It was a sensible alleviation to

his sufferings to hear her kind voice, and look in her gentle face, as

they walked home together; and at length the expectation of this

pleasure began to present itself, in the midst of the busy, dreary

work-hours, as the shadow of a heaven to close up the dismal,

uninteresting day.

But one morning he missed her from her place, and a keener pain passed

through him than he had felt of late; for he knew that the Plague was

abroad, feeding in the low stagnant places of human abode; and he had

but too much reason to dread that she might be now struggling in its

grasp. He seized the first opportunity of slipping out and hurrying

home. He sprang upstairs to her room. He found the door locked, but

heard a faint moaning within. To avoid disturbing her, while determined

to gain an entrance, he went down for the key of his own door, with

which he succeeded in unlocking hers, and so crossed her threshold for

the first time. There she lay on her bed, tossing in pain, and beginning

to be delirious. Careless of his own life, and feeling that he could not

die better than in helping the only friend he had; certain, likewise, of

the difficulty of finding a nurse for one in this disease and of her

station in life; and sure, likewise, that there could be no question of

propriety, either in the circumstances with which they were surrounded,

nor in this case of terrible fever almost as hopeless for her as

dangerous to him, he instantly began the duties of a nurse, and returned

no more to his employment. He had a little money in his possession, for

he could not, in the way in which he lived, spend all his wages; so he

proceeded to make her as comfortable as he could, with all the pent-up

tenderness of a loving heart finding an outlet at length. When a boy at

home, he had often taken the place of nurse, and he felt quite capable

of performing its duties. Nor was his boyhood far behind yet, although

the trials he had come through made it appear an age since he had lost

his light heart. So he never left her bedside, except to procure what

was necessary for her. She was too ill to oppose any of his measures, or

to seek to prohibit his presence. Indeed, by the time he had returned

with the first medicine, she was insensible; and she continued so

through the whole of the following week, during which time he was

constantly with her.

That action produces feeling is as often true as its converse; and it is

not surprising that, while he smoothed the pillow for her head, he

should have made a nest in his heart for the helpless girl. Slowly and

unconsciously he learned to love her. The chasm between his early

associations and the circumstances in which he found her, vanished as he

drew near to the simple, essential womanhood. His heart saw hers and

loved it; and he knew that, the centre once gained, he could, as from

the fountain of life, as from the innermost secret of the holy place,

the hidden germ of power and possibility, transform the outer intellect

and outermost manners as he pleased. With what a thrill of joy, a

feeling for a long time unknown to him, and till now never known in this

form or with this intensity, the thought arose in his heart that here

lay one who some day would love him; that he should have a place of

refuge and rest; one to lie in his bosom and not despise him! “For,”

said he to himself, “I will call forth her soul from where it sleeps,

like an unawakened echo, in an unknown cave; and like a child, of whom I

once dreamed, that was mine, and to my delight turned in fear from all

besides, and clung to me, this soul of hers will run with bewildered,

half-sleeping eyes, and tottering steps, but with a cry of joy on its

lips, to me as the life-giver. She will cling to me and worship me. Then

will I tell her, for she must know all, that I am low and contemptible;

that I am an outcast from the world, and that if she receive me, she

will be to me as God. And I will fall down at her feet and pray her for

comfort, for life, for restoration to myself; and she will throw herself

beside me, and weep and love me, I know. And we will go through life

together, working hard, but for each other; and when we die, she shall

lead me into paradise as the prize her angel-hand found cast on a desert

shore, from the storm of winds and waves which I was too weak to

resist--and raised, and tended, and saved.” Often did such thoughts as

these pass through his mind while watching by her bed; alternated,

checked, and sometimes destroyed, by the fears which attended her

precarious condition, but returning with every apparent betterment or

hopeful symptom.