starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe, thou when first flying through
the gates of Jerusalem, and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing curse
behind thee, couldst not more certainly have read thy doom of sorrow in
the misgivings of thy troubled brain than I when passing for ever from my
sister's room. The worm was at my heart: and, confining myself to that
stage of life, I may say--the worm that could not die. For if, when
standing upon the threshold of manhood, I had ceased to feel its perpetual
gnawings, _that_ was because a vast expansion of intellect, it was because
new hopes, new necessities, and the frenzy of youthful blood, had
translated me into a new creature. Man is doubtless _one_ by some subtle
_nexus_ that we cannot perceive, extending from the newborn infant to the
superannuated dotard: but as regards many affections and passions incident
to his nature at different stages, he is _not_ one; the unity of man in
this respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to which the
passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by
one half of their origin, animal and earthy by the other half. These will
not survive their own appropriate stage. But love, which is _altogether_
holy, like that between two children, will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses
the silence and the darkness of old age: and I repeat my belief--that,
unless bodily torment should forbid it, that final experience in my
sister's bedroom, or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will
rise again for me to illuminate the hour of death.
On the day following this which I have recorded, came a body of medical
men to examine the brain, and the particular nature of the complaint, for
in some of its symptoms it had shown perplexing anomalies. Such is the
sanctity of death, and especially of death alighting on an innocent child,
that even gossiping people do not gossip on such a subject. Consequently,
I knew nothing of the purpose which drew together these surgeons, nor
suspected any thing of the cruel changes which might have been wrought in
my sister's head. Long after this I saw a similar case; I surveyed the
corpse (it was that of a beautiful boy, eighteen years old, who had died
of the same complaint) one hour _after_ the surgeons had laid the skull in
ruins; but the dishonours of this scrutiny were hidden by bandages, and
had not disturbed the repose of the countenance. So it might have been
here; but, if it were _not_ so, then I was happy in being spared the
shock, from having that marble image of peace, icy and rigid as it was,
unsettled by disfiguring images. Some hours after the strangers had
withdrawn, I crept again to the room, but the door was now locked--the key
was taken away--and I was shut out for ever.
Then came the funeral. I, as a point of decorum, was carried thither. I
was put into a carriage with some gentlemen whom I did not know. They
were kind to me; but naturally they talked of things disconnected with the
occasion, and their conversation was a torment. At the church, I was told
to hold a white handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy! What need had
_he_ of masques or mockeries, whose heart died within him at every word
that was uttered? During that part of the service which passed within the
church, I made an effort to attend, but I sank back continually into my
own solitary darkness, and I heard little consciously, except some
fugitive strains from the sublime chapter of St Paul, which in England is
always read at burials. And here I notice a profound error of our present
illustrious Laureate. When I heard those dreadful words--for dreadful they
were to me--"It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is
sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory;" such was the recoil of my
feelings, that I could even have shrieked out a protesting--"Oh, no, no!"
if I had not been restrained by the publicity of the occasion. In after
years, reflecting upon this revolt of my feelings, which, being the voice
of nature in a child, must be as true as any mere _opinion_ of a child
might probably be false, I saw at once the unsoundness of a passage in
_The Excursion_. The book is not here, but the substance I remember
perfectly. Mr Wordsworth argues, that if it were not for the unsteady
faith which people fix upon the beatific condition after death of those
whom they deplore, nobody could be found so selfish, as even secretly to
wish for the restoration to earth of a beloved object. A mother, for
instance, could never dream of yearning for her child, and secretly
calling it back by her silent aspirations from the arms of God, if she
were but reconciled to the belief that really it _was_ in those arms. But
this I utterly deny. To take my own case, when I heard those dreadful
words of St Paul applied to my sister--viz. that she should be raised a
spiritual body--nobody can suppose that selfishness, or any other feeling
than that of agonizing love, caused the rebellion of my heart against
them. I knew already that she was to come again in beauty and power. I did
not now learn this for the first time. And that thought, doubtless, made
my sorrow sublimer; but also it made it deeper. For here lay the sting of
it, viz. in the fatal words--"We shall be _changed_." How was the unity of
my interest in her to be preserved, if she were to be altered, and no
longer to reflect in her sweet countenance the traces that were sculptured
on my heart? Let a magician ask any woman whether she will permit him to
improve her child, to raise it even from deformity to perfect beauty, if
that must be done at the cost of its identity, and there is no loving
mother but would reject his proposal with horror. Or, to take a case that
has actually happened, if a mother were robbed of her child at two years
old by gipsies, and the same child were restored to her at twenty, a fine
young man, but divided by a sleep as it were of death from all
remembrances that could restore the broken links of their once-tender
connexion, would she not feel her grief unhealed, and her heart defrauded?
Undoubtedly she would. All of us ask not of God for a better thing than
that we have lost; we ask for the same, even with its faults and its
frailties. It is true that the sorrowing person will also be changed
eventually, but that must be by death. And a prospect so remote as that,
and so alien from our present nature, cannot console us in an affliction
which is not remote but present--which is not spiritual but human.
Lastly came the magnificent service which the English church performs at
the side of the grave. There is exposed once again and for the last time,
the coffin. All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the
day of departure from earth--records how useless! and dropped into
darkness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes
the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart with volleying
discharges, peal after peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin
is lowered into its home; it has disappeared from the eye. The sacristan
stands ready with his shovel of earth and stones. The priest's voice is
heard once more--_earth to earth_, and the dread rattle ascends from the
lid of the coffin; _ashes to ashes_, and again the killing sound is
heard; _dust to dust_, and the farewell volley announces that the
grave--the coffin--the face are sealed up for ever and ever.
* * * * *
Oh, grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it
is, that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds.
Thou shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou
sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. Among the very
foremost of mine was morbid sensibility to shame. And ten years
afterwards, I used to reproach myself with this infirmity, by supposing
the case, that, if it were thrown upon me to seek aid for a perishing
fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that aid only by facing a vast
company of critical or sneering faces, I might perhaps shrink basely from
the duty. It is true, that no such case had ever actually occurred, so
that it was a mere romance of casuistry to tax myself with cowardice so
shocking. But to feel a doubt, was to feel condemnation; and the crime
which _might_ have been, was in my eyes the crime which _had_ been. Now,
however, all was changed; and for any thing which regarded my sister's
memory, in one hour I received a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a
case resembling it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own
nature, in a service of love--yes, slough it as completely, as ever
serpent sloughed his skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from
which all escape was hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she
advanced boldly, bleating clamorously, until he followed her and rescued
her beloved. Not less was the change in myself. Fifty thousand sneering
faces would not have troubled me in any office of tenderness to my
sister's memory. Ten legions would not have repelled me from seeking her,
if there was chance that she could be found. Mockery! it was lost upon me.
Laugh at me, as one or two people did! I valued not their laughter. And
when I was told insultingly to cease "my girlish tears", that word
"_girlish_" had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one
eternal thought of my heart--that a girl was the sweetest thing I, in my
short life, had known--that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with
beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from
which, in this world, I was to drink no more.
Interesting it is to observe how certainly all deep feelings agree in
this, that they seek for solitude, and are nursed by solitude. Deep grief,
deep love, how naturally do these ally themselves with religious feeling;
and all three, love, grief, religion, are haunters of solitary places.
Love, grief, the passion of reverie, or the mystery of devotion--what were
these without solitude? All day long, when it was not impossible for me to
do so, I sought the most silent and sequestered nooks in the grounds about
the house, or in the neighbouring fields. The awful stillness occasionally
of summer noons, when no winds were abroad, the appealing silence of grey
or misty afternoons--these were fascinations as of witchcraft. Into the
woods or the desert air I gazed as if some comfort lay hid in _them_. I
wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks. I tormented the
blue depths with obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes and
searching them for ever after one angelic face that might perhaps have
permission to reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping images in
the distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings
of the heart, aided by a slight defect in my eyes, grew upon me at this
time. And I recal at the present moment one instance of that sort, which
may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all,
could furnish a sufficient basis for this creative faculty. On Sunday
mornings I was always taken to church: it was a church on the old and
natural model of England, having aisles, galleries, organ, all things
ancient and venerable, and the proportions majestic. Here, whilst the
congregation knelt through the long Litany, as often as we came to that
passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so, where God is supplicated
on behalf of "all sick persons and young children," and that he would
"show his pity upon all prisoners and captives"--I wept in secret, and
raising my streaming eyes to the windows of the galleries, saw, on days
when the sun was shining, a spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can
have beheld. The sides of the windows were rich with storied glass;
through the deep purples and crimsons streamed the golden light;
emblazonries of heavenly illumination mingling with the earthly
emblazonries of what is grandest in man. There were the apostles that had
trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial love to
man. There were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth through
flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce insulting faces.
There were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had glorified God by
meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst this tumult of
sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from an accompaniment in the
bass, I saw through the wide central field of the window, where the glass
was uncoloured, white fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the
sky; were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately under
the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped itself into a
vision of beds with white lawny curtains; and in the beds lay sick
children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping
clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious reason, could not suddenly
release them from their pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to
rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the beds ascended into the chambers
of the air; slowly, also, his arms descended from the heavens, that he and
his young children whom in Judea, once and for ever, he had blessed,
though they _must_ pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation,
might yet meet the sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These
visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my
feelings. The hint from the Litany, the fragment from the clouds, those
and the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the
tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes in
anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound,
fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir--when it rose high in
arches, as might seem, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal
parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into
unity--sometimes I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those clouds which so
recently I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate sorrow, and even as
ministers of sorrow in its creations; yes, sometimes under the
transfigurations of music I felt[11] of grief itself as a fiery chariot
for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief.
I point so often to the feelings, the ideas, or the ceremonies of
religion, because there never yet was profound grief nor profound
philosophy which did not inosculate at many points with profound religion.
But I request the reader to understand, that of all things I was not, and
could not have been, a child trained to _talk_ of religion, least of all
to talk of it controversially or polemically. Dreadful is the picture,
which in books we sometimes find, of children discussing the doctrines of
Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the boundaries and
distinctions between doctrine and doctrine. And it has often struck me
with amazement, that the two things which God made most beautiful among
his works, viz. infancy and pure religion, should, by the folly of man,
(in yoking them together on erroneous principles,) neutralize each other's
beauty, or even form a combination positively hateful The religion
becomes nonsense, and the child becomes a hypocrite. The religion is
transfigured into cant, and the innocent child into a dissembling
liar.[12]
God, be assured, takes care for the religion of children wheresoever his
Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a national church established,
to which a child sees his friends resorting; wheresoever he beholds all
whom he honours periodically prostrate before those illimitable heavens
which fill to overflowing his young adoring heart; wheresoever he sees the
sleep of death falling at intervals upon men and women whom he knows,
depth as confounding to the plummet of his mind as those heavens ascend
beyond his power to pursue--_there_ take you no thought for the religion
of a child, any more than for the lilies how they shall be arrayed, or for
the ravens how they shall feed their young.
God speaks to children also in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in
darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal by the truths
and services of a national church, God holds "communion undisturbed" with
children. Solitude, though silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest
of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this
world _alone_--all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread,
whispering consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel into
God's presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand,
nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child,
all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which
in this world appals or fascinates a child's heart, is but the echo of a
far deeper solitude through which already he has passed, and of another
solitude deeper still, through which he _has_ to pass: reflex of one
solitude--prefiguration of another.
Oh, burthen of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his
being--in his birth, which _has_ been--in his life, which _is_--in his
death, which _shall_ be--mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and
art, and art to be;--thou broodest, like the spirit of God moving upon the
surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of
Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be
nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the
principles of all things, solitude for a child is the Agrippa's mirror of
the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude in life of millions upon
millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them. Deep
is the solitude of those who, with secret griefs, have none to pity them.
Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have
none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these solitudes is
that which broods over childhood, bringing before it at intervals the
final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting for it within the
gates of death. Reader, I tell you a truth, and hereafter I will convince
you of this truth, that for a Grecian child solitude was nothing, but for
a Christian child it has become the power of God and the mystery of God.
Oh, mighty and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to
be--thou, kindling under the torch of Christian revelations, art now
transfigured for ever, and hast passed from a blank negation into a secret
hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of infancy the very dimmest
of his truths!
MRS POOLE'S "ENGLISHWOMAN IN EGYPT."[13]
An "Englishwoman in Egypt," thanks to the Mediterranean steamers and the
overland route to India, is no longer so unusual or astounding a spectacle
as it would appear to have been five-and-twenty years ago, when that
dilettante traveller, Monsieur le Comte de Forbin, made a precipitate
retreat from Thebes in consequence of the shock sustained by his nerves,
from encountering among the ruins "une femme-de-chambre Anglaise, en petit
_spencer_ couleur de rose," in the person of the Countess of Belmore's
lady's-maid; though the Quarterly Reviewers, who in those days had no
mercy for a French misstatement, even in the colour of a soubrette's
dress, triumphantly declared the offending garment to have been "a
pale-blue pelisse;" and proceeded to demolish the hapless Count
accordingly--(_Quarterly Review_, Vol. xxiii. p. 92.) Since the period of
this rencontre, the _ill-omened_ blue eyes,[14] as well as blue pelisses,
of our countrywomen, have been seen with sufficient frequency on the banks
of the Nile to render the one, it is to be hoped, no longer an object of
alarm to the natives, nor the latter to errant members of the Institute:
but a narrative of the impressions produced on a cultivated female mind by
a residence among the modern inhabitants of the land of the pyramids, was
still a desideratum. The "Notes" (published in 1840 in the _Asiatic
Journal_) of the late lamented Emma Roberts, than whom no one would have
been better qualified to fill up the void, though replete with interest
and information, are merely those of a traveller hastening through the
country on her way to India; and, except the fugitive sketches of Mrs
Dawson Damer, we cannot call to mind a single one among all the
lady-tourists, with whose tours and voyages the press has lately teemed,
who has touched on this hitherto unbroken ground. In such a dearth of
information, we may deem ourselves doubly fortunate in finding the task
undertaken by a lady possessing such peculiar advantages as must have been
enjoyed by the sister of the well-known Orientalist, to whose pen we are
indebted for perhaps the most comprehensive and accurate account ever
published of the habits and manners of any nation, and under whose
immediate superintendence, as we are informed, the work before us was
prepared.
The title of the "Englishwoman in _Cairo_," would perhaps have more
appropriately designated the character of Mrs Poole's volumes than that
which she has adopted; since her opportunities of personal observation,
after her arrival in the capital from Alexandria, were bounded by the
environs of the city, her excursions from which do not appear to have
extended further than the pyramids. A considerable portion of the first
volume is occupied by an abstract of Egyptian history from the time of the
Arab conquest, an account of the foundation of Cairo, an agricultural and
general calendar for each month of the year, and various matters connected
with the physical features, statistics, &c., of the country. These
dissertations form a sort of supplement to the work of her brother, from
whose MS. notes they are avowedly taken; being introduced (as Mrs Poole,
with much _naivete_, confesses) "in the hope of obtaining a more
favourable reception for her letters, for the sake of the more solid
matter with which they are interspersed;" but though they certainly convey
much valuable additional information to the readers of the "Modern
Egyptians," they are scarcely "germane to the matter," as interpolations
in the work of a lady. The authoress can very well afford to rest her
claim to popularity on her own merits; and we prefer to follow her, in her
own peculiar sphere, into those mysterious recesses of an Oriental
establishment, whither no male footstep can ever penetrate. Mrs Poole is
probably the first English lady who has been admitted, not merely as a
passing visitor, but as a privileged friend, into the hareems of those of
the highest rank in the Egyptian capital. We find her threading the narrow
and crowded thoroughfares of Cairo, borne aloft on the "high ass,"[15]
(the usual mode of conveyance for morning calls;) and are introduced to
the wives and daughters of the viceroy, and even (in the hareem of Habeeb
Effendi) to ladies of the imperial house of Othman, in the ease and
_disinvoltura_ of their domestic circles, amid that atmosphere of _dolce
far niente_ and graceful etiquette, in which the hours of an Oriental
princess appear to be habitually passed. With the exception of Lady Mary
Wortley Montague's piquant sketches of the Turkish hareems and their
inmates, and the singular narrative of her personal experience of life in
an Indian zenana, by _Mrs Meer Hassan Ali_,[16] we know no female writer
who has enjoyed such opportunities for the delineation of the scenes of
domestic privacy of the East, and who has so well availed herself of them,
as the sister of _Mansoor Effendi_, in the pages before us.