THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between
brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions
for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of
early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or
neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their
common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common,
are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences
enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and
zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter
directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a
rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister
who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the
author of "Counterparts" and "Charles Auchester," who, devoured by
the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat
extravagantly, "O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood!
Surpassing all other friendship, leavening with angel solicitude the
purest love of earth. No lovership like that of the brother and the
sister, however passionate their spirits, when they truly love."
Narcissus, in the classic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was
most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other.
It was only when death had snatched her from his side, that, pining
under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught
glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for
his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away
till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.
Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the
friendship of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic
pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friendship of
Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was
under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother
and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon.
Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother,
prays to the goddess for pity and help:
For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother
Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee,
And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn
Thy virgin face to his eternal light.
A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness
and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the
sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The
canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they
were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their
retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night
together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of
heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in
her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that
moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven
in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it
laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had
previously prepared for himself. The friendship of Tasso and his
sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song.
When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the
poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would
test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not
seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he
presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so
piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she
fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and
Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection,
were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans
in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.
The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing,
restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not
stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous
Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her
brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and
he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her
nursing, restored him. She then formed a friendship with the sister
of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus
securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring
monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her
inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, "she went
every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to
catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, "Ah
whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother,
though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and
embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom."
Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know
that the love of Francis to her was not a tithe of hers to him. He
loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny
which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness
and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies
and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by
their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name
and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an
imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in
shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on
his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great
loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental
philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very
accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of
friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them.
He says, "They were pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
were not divided; for, as he lived with her above forty years, so he
did not outlive her a week." The countess "lived the longest on the
most public scene, and made the greatest figure, in all the
revolutions of these kingdoms for above fifty years, of any woman of
that age." She laid out her time, her interest, and her estate, with
the greatest zeal and success, in doing good to others, without
regard to sects or relations. "When any party was down, she had
credit and zeal enough to serve them; and she employed these so
effectually, that, in the next turn, she had a new stock of credit,
which she laid out wholly in that labor of love in which she spent
her life. And though some particular opinions might shut her up in a
divided communion, yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her
charities and friendships both, her esteem as well as her bounty,
with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any
difference made upon the account of opinion. She had, with a vast
reach of knowledge and apprehension, an universal affability and
easiness of access, an humility that descended to the meanest persons
and concerns, an obliging kindness and readiness to advise those who
had no occasion for any farther assistance from her. And with all
those and many other excellent qualities, she had the deepest sense
of religion, and the most constant turning of her thoughts and
discourses that way, that has been, perhaps, in our age. Such a
sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their
characters, that they should have improved the relation under which
they were born to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." Two
of the most distinguished in the long roll of eminent astronomers are
a brother and a sister, Sir William and Caroline Herschel. The story
of their united labors, how, for thousands of nights, side by side
they sat and watched and calculated and wrote, one sweeping the
telescopic heavens, the other assisting, and noting down the results;
how, with one spirit and one interest, they grew old together and
illustrious together; their several achievements, both at home and in
observatories on strange shores to which they voyaged, always
associated; with what affectionate care she trained the favorite
nephew, who was to burnish into still more effulgent brightness the
star-linked name of Herschel, the story of all this is full of
attractiveness, and forms one of the warm and poetic episodes in the
high, cold annals of science. The union of John Aikin and his sister
Letitia, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, in life, tastes, labors, was
uncommonly close and complete. The narrative of it; so warm,
substantial, and healthy was it, leaves a pleasing and invigorating
influence on the sympathies of those who read it. They composed
together several of their excellent and most useful literary works.
While Mrs. Barbauld was tarrying at Geneva, her brother addressed a
letter in verse to her:
Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast,
And paints one darling object unpossessed.
How many years have whirled their rapid course
Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source,
In fond affection, as in blood, allied,
Have wandered devious from each other's side,
Allowed to catch alone some transient view,
Scarce long enough to think the vision true!
Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains;
While transport yet can swell the beating veins;
While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat,
And fancy still retains some genial heat;
When evening bids each busy task be o'er,
Once let us meet again, to part no more!
That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the
last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which
admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart.
There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his
sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his
companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest
ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle,
he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all
who came between them.
They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might
have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them
into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and
was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again
drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly
at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of
mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her
want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded
confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet
Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my
sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret
satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but
feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I
was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At
twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate
friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her
brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded:
"Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest,
behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed
any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his
autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,
"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt
inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there
arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might
have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could
be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the
tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious
design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me
but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid
of a magic mirror."
A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed
between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years,"
Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling
and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies,
all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the
lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given
by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied
devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the
excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and
affectionate sincerity of their attachment.
There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his
youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius,
spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with
my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives."
"Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness,
imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination
of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in
walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of
primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a
covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves,
and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our
recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to
write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed
days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we
had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed
over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages
in his long autobiography.
Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful
pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher
reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their
correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied
intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience
in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they
appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities
cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated
for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted
sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of
character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and
name.
The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were
overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long
trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in
his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its
lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years
younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar
temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same
bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a
naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the
tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his
affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable
utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,
The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears; A
heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love and thought and joy.
They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.
This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.
When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in
hexameters, in which were these lines:
William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You
have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.
At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a
common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite
sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in
heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that
who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her
information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of
nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the
period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the
dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,
When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.
She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the
embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and
despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In
the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:
Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed,...
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.
Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company.
His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition
he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that
Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed
with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the
"Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her.
And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will,
better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it
fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.
Mine eyes did ne'er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.
The thought of her was like a flash of light,
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.
The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad
things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have
veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble
qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses,
he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of
fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power
in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most
authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before,
acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One
can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and
fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley
called
The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head, like heaven, is bent--
An early but enduring monument.
Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre
as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his
wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister
Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through
the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England.
With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he
has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other
could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for
her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew
drear and dark," he says,
When fortune changed, and love fled far,
And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary star
Which rose, and set not to the last.
The wonderful verses commencing,
Though the day of my destiny's over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find,
wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into
language of such vigor and such melody.
From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
Thus much I at least may recall:
It hath taught me that what I most cherished
Deserved to be dearest of all.
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.
To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe
Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and
my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved,
this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate
brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,
The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine;
and ending,
Nor could on earth a spot be found
To nature and to me so dear,
Could thy dear eyes,
In following mine,
Still sweeten more
These banks of Rhine,
expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty,
that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them,
and repeat them over and over.
One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in
thought and in passion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was
living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.
My sister, my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine.
Go where I will, to me thou art the same,
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny,
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.
I feel almost, at times, as I have felt
In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks,
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books;
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
And even, at moments, I could think I see
Some living thing to love, but none like thee.
Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow
The fool of my own wishes, and forget
The solitude which I have vaunted so
Has lost its praise in this but one regret.
The last intelligible words of Byron were,
"Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."
It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more
inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible
trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that
of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written
expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister,"
composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in
the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of
insanity.
Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.
Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in
Talfourd's "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a
mother's care, a sister's tenderness, and a friend's fervent
sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He
appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her
feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a
loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fortitude,
which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the
crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and
his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck
her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of
hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in
love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had
written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his
fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his
unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his
dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but
resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn
gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or
more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He
never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license
for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her
as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom
he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my
poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of
selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great
sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences
of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I
think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning
against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal
nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to
myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life
and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their
hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious
at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully
deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would
invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was
laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:
Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.
Her only mate is now the minstrel lark,
Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
A sister's tears.
Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who
knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors
entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary
and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.
The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful,
like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them
both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The
more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not
interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when
together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions,
too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate
thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their
instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly
intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any
vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London,
sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first
with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of
these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter
or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth.
Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the
reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate
tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of
feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous
region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix,
amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible
calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of
his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an
improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the
assembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached
him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On
receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so
great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm
potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his
already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils
bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a
world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.
One of the noblest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave,
and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what
Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his.
They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together,
had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her
death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who
was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste
and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly
tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said
that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her
departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this
tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in
his land:
As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Gainst the household bosom lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed within the fadeless green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh! looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: The chill
weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where'er I went,
With dark eyes full of love's content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June's unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life's late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a
sister and it is one of the most interesting that history reveals to
us shall close this list. Maurice de Guérin was born in Languedoc, in
France, in the year 1811; and there also, in 1839, he died. Although
snatched away at twenty-eight, his fascinating personality and genius
left an indelible impression on all appreciative persons who had come
in contact with him. His writings, few and unelaborate as they are,
have won admiring praise from the judges whose verdict is fame. His
sister Eugénie, six years older than himself, took the place of
mother as well as that of sister to the orphan boy. He was not more
extraordinary for winsomeness and talent than she was for combined
power of intelligence, tenacity of affection, and religiousness of
principle. They became ardent friends, in the most emphatic meaning
of the term. Maurice went to Paris to try his fortune as a writer.
Eugénie's yearning and anxious heart followed him in rapid letters.
She tells him how they whom he has left all love him, encourages him
with virtue and piety, adjures him to be true to his best self. She
says to him, with the irresistible eloquence of the heart, "We see
things with the same eyes: what you find beautiful, I find beautiful.
God has made our souls of one piece." Maurice's replies were shorter
and rarer. It is evident, the reader feels it with a pang of regret,
that Eugénie was much less to Maurice than he was to her; and yet he
loved her well. But man's love is usually poor compared with woman's;
and he was in the throngs of Paris, she in the solitude of a country
home. He fell away from his original purity and constancy, lost his
religious faith for a season, and seemed almost to forget those who
idolized him with such deep fondness. Was he not one of the charmers,
who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return
comparatively so little?
Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections,
unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul
as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love
with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugénie went to him in
Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was
brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair.
After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal,
"My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this
marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us
more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you
than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old
built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked
forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a
great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge
in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your
sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue
for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has
the power of loving."
Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of
a rapid consumption, in his father's house, ministered to by his wife
and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the
last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his
wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he
to dying." The shock came upon Eugénie with crushing severity. Ever
after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face,"
"his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day
I see pass and repass before me that dear, pale face: that
beautiful head assumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling,
eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you
have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so
short, your repose so rare, O God! uphold me. How we have gazed at
him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he
lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were
asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other
again on earth?"
Five years previous to her brother's death, Eugénie had begun a
journal, which she forwarded to him from time to time. After the
funeral, she tried to continue this, addressing it still to him: "To
Maurice dead, to Maurice in heaven. He was the pride and joy of my
heart. Oh, how sweet a name, and how full of tenderness, is that of
brother!" She persevered for five months, when it became too painful,
and she abandoned it. From this time till death overtook her, in the
year 1848, she seemed to have but one purpose; namely, to secure
Maurice's fame by the publication of his literary remains. Poverty
and various other obstacles baffled all her efforts. But, in 1858, M.
Trebutien, a loving and faithful friend, edited and published, in a
single volume, the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guérin;" and,
five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal
and Letters of Eugénie de Guérin." The striking original genius and
worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them,
insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As
long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of
gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of
pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips
easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking
out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother's;
so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now
gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of
my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I
can do is to strain my gaze into it."