IS FULL OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS DISQUISITIONS, THEREFORE IT BEHOVETH THE
GENERAL READER TO LOOK AT AND PASS IT BY WITH THAT INATTENTION THAT
READERS GENERALLY HAVE FOR MORALITY AND RELIGION.
When the boys came downstairs, there was as comfortless a scene
displayed before them as the most retributive justice could have wished
to visit on the rebellious. The morning raw and cold, the floor
saturated with water, and covered with cases of exploded fireworks; the
school-room in horrible confusion, scarcely a pane of glass
unshattered--the walls blackened, the books torn--and then the masters
and ushers stole in, looking both suspicious and discomfited. Well, we
went to prayers, and very lugubriously did we sing the hymn:--
"Awake, my soul, and with the sun,
Thy daily course of duty run."
Now, that morning, no one could tell whether the sun had waked or not,
at least he kept his bed-curtains of fog closely drawn; and, about
twenty-five of the scholars gave a new reading to "thy daily course of
duty run," as, immediately after they had paid their doleful orisons,
they took the course of running their duty by running away. There were
no classes that day. Mr Root did not make his appearance--and we had a
constrained holiday.
On the 7th, to use a nautical expression, we had repaired damages, and
we began to fall into the usual routine of scholastic business: but it
was full a week before our master made his appearance in the
school-room, and he did so then with a green shade over his eyes, to
conceal the green shades under them. He came in at the usual hour of
noon--the black list was handed up to him--and I expected, in the usual
order of things, an assiduous flogging. But in this world we are the
martyrs of disappointment. The awful man folded up the paper very
melancholily, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket, and thus saved me
the expense of some very excellent magnanimity, which I had determined
to display, had he proceeded to flagellation. It was my intention very
intrepidly to have told him, that if he punished me I also would run
away. On the veracity of a schoolboy, I was disappointed at not
receiving my three or four dozen.
I had now fairly commenced my enthusiastic epoch. I was somebody. I
still slept in the haunted room. I had struck the first blow in the
barring out--Saint Albans had openly commended me for my bravery--I
could no longer despise myself, and the natural consequence was that
others dared not. I formed friendships, evanescent certainly, but very
sweet and very sincere. Several of the young gentlemen promised to
prevail upon their parents to invite me to their homes during the
approaching holidays; but either their memories were weak, or their
fathers obdurate.
Well, the winter holidays came at last, and I was left sole inhabitant
of that vast and lonely school-room, with one fire for my solace, and
one tenpenny dip for my enlightenment. How awful and supernatural
seemed every passing sound that beat upon my anxious ears! Everything
round me seemed magnified--the massive shadows were as the wombs teeming
with unearthly phantoms--the whistle of the wintry blasts against the
windows, voiced the half-unseen beings that my fears acknowledged in the
deep darknesses of the vast chamber. And then that lonely orchestra,--
often did I think that I heard low music from the organ, as if touched
by ghostly fingers--how gladly I would have sunk down from my solitude
to the vulgarity of the servant's hall--but that was now carefully
interdicted. The consequences of all this seclusion to a highly
imaginative and totally unregulated mind, must have been much worse than
putting me to sleep in the haunted room, for in that I had my
counter-spell--and long use had almost endeared me to it and its
grotesque carvings--but this dismally large school-room, generally so
instinct with life, so superabounding in animation, was painfully
fearful, even from the contrast. Twenty times in the evening, when the
cold blast came creeping along the floor and wound round my ankles, did
I imagine it was the chill hand of some corpse, thrust up from beneath,
that was seizing me in order to drag me downwards--and a hundred times,
as the long flame from the candle flared up tremulously, and shook the
deep shadows that encompassed me around, did I fancy that there were
very hideous faces indeed mouthing at me amidst the gloom--and my own
gigantic shadow--it was a vast horror of itself personified! It was a
cruel thing, even in Mr Root, to leave me alone so many hours in that
stupendous gloom; but his wife--fie upon her!
Considering how my imagination had been before worked upon, even from my
earliest childhood, and the great nervous excitability of my
temperament, it is a wonder that my mind did not reel, if not succumb--
but I now began to combat the approaches of one sort of insanity with
the actual presence of another--I _wrote verses_. That was "tempering
the wind to the shorn lamb," as Sterne would have expressed it, after
the prettiest fashion imaginable.
Had I not the reader so completely at my mercy--did I not think him or
her not only the gentlest but also the most deserving of all the progeny
of Japhet--did I not think that it would be the very acme of ingratitude
to impose upon him or her, I would certainly transcribe a centaine, or
so, of these juvenile poems. It is true, they are very bad--but, then,
that is a proof that they are undeniably genuine. I really have, in
some things, a greatness of soul. I will refrain--but in order that
these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the
annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation,
but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable
class of books.
Well, during these dismal holidays, I wrote verses and began to take, or
to make, my madness methodical. The boys came back, and having left me
a very Bobadil, they found me a juvenile Bavius.
I now began to approach my thirteenth year, and, what with my rhyming
and my fistical prowess,--my character for bravery and the peculiarity
of my situation, as it regarded its mystery--I became that absurd thing
that the French call "_une tete montee_." Root had ceased to flog me.
I could discover that he even began to fear me--and just in proportion
as he seemed to avoid all occasion to punish me, I became towards him
mild, observant, and respectful. The consequence was, that, as I was no
longer frightened out of my wits at church, from very weariness, and for
the sake of variety, I began to attend to the sermons. What a lesson
ought not this to be to instructors! One Sunday I returned from church
in a state of almost spiritual intoxication. The rector was a pale,
attenuated man, with a hollow, yet flashing eye--a man who seemed to
have done with everything in this world, excepting to urge on his
brethren to that better one, to which himself was fast hastening; and,
on this memorable day, that I fancied myself a convert, he had been
descanting on the life of the young Samuel. Of course he, very
appropriately, often turned to the juvenile part of his congregation;
and as I was seated in the front row, I felt as if I were alone in the
church--as if every word were individually addressed to myself; his
imploring yet impassioned glances seemed to irradiate my breast with a
sweet glory. I felt at once, that since the goodness of the Creator was
inexhaustible, the fault must rest with man if there were no more
Samuels, so I determined to be one--to devote myself entirely to divine
abstraction, to heavenly glory, and to incessant worship--and,
stupendous as the assertion may seem, for six weeks I did so. This
resolution became a passion--a madness. I was as one walking in a sweet
trance--I revelled in secret bliss, as if I had found a glorious and
inexhaustible treasure. I spoke to none of my new state of mind--
absorbed as I was, I yet dreaded ridicule--but I wrote hymns, I composed
sermons. If I found my attention moving from heavenly matters, I grew
angry with myself, and I renovated my flagging attention with inward
ejaculation. I had all the madness of the anchorite upon me in the
midst of youthful society, yet without his asceticism, and certainly
without his vanity.
My studies, of course, were nearly totally neglected, under this
complete alienation of spirit, and Mr Root, lenient as he had lately
become towards me, began to flog again; and--shall I be believed when I
say it?--I have been examining my memory most severely, and I am sure it
has delivered up its record faithfully; but yet I hardly dare give it to
the world--but, despite of ridicule, I find myself compelled to say,
that these floggings I scarcely felt. I looked upon them as something
received for the sake of an inscrutable and unfathomable love, and I
courted them--they were pleasurable. I now can well understand the
enthusiasm and the raptures of that ridiculous class of exploded
visionaries, called flagellants. I certainly was in a state of complete
oblivion to everything but a dreamy fanaticism, and yet that term is too
harsh, and it would be impiety to call it holiness, seeing that it was
in a state of inutility,--and yet, many well-meaning persons will think,
no doubt, that my infant and almost sinless hand had hold of a blessed
link of that chain of ineffable love, which terminates in the breast of
that awful Being, who sits at the right-hand of the throne of the
Eternal. I give, myself, no opinion. I only state facts. But I cannot
help hazarding a conjecture of what I might have been, had I then
possessed a friend in any one of my instructors, who could have pointed
out to me what were the precincts of true piety, what those of incipient
insanity. At that time I had the courage to achieve anything. Let the
cold-hearted and the old say what they will, youth is the time for moral
bravery. The withered and the aged mistake their failing forces for
calmness and resignation, and an apathy, the drear anticipator of death,
for presence of mind.
However, this state of exalted feeling had a very ludicrous termination.
I ceased fighting, I was humble, seeking whom I might serve, reproving
no one, but striving hard to love all, giving, assisting, and actually
panting for an opportunity of receiving a slap on one side of the face,
that I might offer the other for the same infliction. The reader may be
sure that I had the Bible almost constantly before me, when not employed
in what I conceived some more active office of what I thought
sanctification. But though the spirit may be strong, at times, the body
will be weak. I believe I dozed for a few minutes over the sacred book,
when a wag stole it away, and substituted for it the "renowned and
veracious History of the Seven Champions of Christendom." There was the
frontispiece, the gallant Saint George, in gold and green armour,
thrusting his spear into the throat of the dragon, in green and gold
scales. What a temptation! I ogled the book coyly at first. I asked
for my Bible. "Read that, Ralph," said the purloiner; oh! recreant that
I was, I read it.
I was cured in three hours of being a saint, of despising flogging, and
of aping Samuel.