“wail of discordant sadness for the wrongs he never can right,”
for the brothers, and ah for the sisters, he cannot help. But sometimes,
also, he bursts forth into “a song of gladness, a pæan of joyous might.”
Both are in him: the wail for the lost Lord and the thanksgiving to God
for his “GLORIOUS OXYGEN.” (The capitals are his own.) With the first, we
have done: let us look at the second and see what he has to show us of
living and loving, of action and women, and then see what he has to show
us of life as a whole, “the conclusion of the whole matter.”
I have said elsewhere that there is in Gordon the cheer and charge of our
chivalry. There is. He was well worthy of a place in the charge of our
cavalry at Waterloo, or Balaclava. There is in him that “magnificence”
which now, alas, as the Frenchman truly said, “is not war.” These men
“glory in daring that dies or prevails.” And when, as at Balaclava, they
die, their poet exclaims (in capitals)—
“not in vain,
as a type of our chivalry!”
What exclamations of rapture such a sight draws from him!
“Oh! the moments of yonder maddening ride,
long years of life outvie!...
God send me an ending as fair as his,
who died in his stirrups there!...”