the world, but like most of their species, they were only _half right_.
Mrs. Waterton _did_ go with the intention of seeking her sister’s
protection, but ere she arrived there, she was persuaded to travel
farther under the protection of her fascinating friend. Mr. Waterton did
not enter a lunatic asylum, but recovered his senses so fully that he
obtained a divorce from his wife, and is now a fellow-clerk with his
uncle; enjoying as much tranquility as a remembrance of his former
follies, his imprudent choice, and his three years of wedded life will
allow.
Brooklyn, N. Y.
* * * * *
A DREAM OF THE LONELY ISLE.
BY MRS. M. ST. LEON LOUD.
There is an isle in the far south sea,
Sunny and bright as an isle can be;
Sweet is the sound of the ocean wave,
As its sparkling waters the green shores lave;
And from the shell that upon the strand
Lies half buried in golden sand—
A thrilling tone through the still air rings,
Like music trembling on fairy strings.
Flowers like those which the Peris find
In the bowers of their paradise, and bind
In the flowing tresses, are blooming there,
And gay birds glance through the scented air.
Gems and pearls are strew’d on the earth
Untouch’d—there are none to know their worth;
And that fair island death comes not nigh:
Why should he come?—there are none to die.
My heart had grown, like the Misanthrope’s,
Cold and dead to all human hopes;
Fame and fortune alike had proved
Baseless dreams, and the friends I loved
Vanish’d away, like the flowers that fade
In the deadly blight of the Upas shade.
I long’d upon that green isle to be,
Far away o’er the sounding sea;
Where no human voice, with its words of pain,
Could ever fall on my ear again.
Life seem’d a desert waste to me,
And I sought in slumber from care to flee.
Away, away, o’er the waters blue,
Light as a sea-bird the vessel flew.
Deep ocean furrows her timbers plow,
As the waves are parted before her prow;
And the foaming billows close o’er her path,
Hissing and roaring, as if in wrath.
But swiftly onward, through foam and spray,
To the lonely island she steers her way.
The heavens above wore their brightest smile,
As the bark was moor’d by that fairy isle;
The sails were furl’d, the voyage was o’er:
I should buffet the waves of the world no more.
I look’d to the ocean—the bark was gone,
And I stood on that beautiful isle, alone.
My wish was granted, and I was blest;
My spirit revell’d in perfect rest,—
A Dead Sea calm,—even thought repos’d
Like a weary dove with its pinions closed.
Beauty was round me: bright roses hung
Their blushing wreaths o’er my head, and flung
Fragrance abroad on the gale, to me
Sweeter than odors of Araby;
Wealth was mine, for the yellow gold
Lay before me in heaps untold.
Death to that island knew not the way,
But life was mine for ever and aye,
Till Love again made my heart its throne,
And I ceased to dwell on the isle, alone.
Long did my footsteps delighted range
My peaceful home, but there came a change;
My heart grew sad, and I looked with pain
On all I had barter’d life’s ties to gain.
A chilling weight on my spirits fell,
As the low, soft wail of the ocean shell—
Or the bee’s faint hum in the flowery wood,
Was all that broke on my solitude.
Oh! then I felt, in my loneliness,
That earth had no power the heart to bless,
Unwarm’d by affection’s holy ray;
And hope was withered, as day by day
I watch’d for the bark, but in vain, in vain;
She never sought that green isle again.
I stretch’d my arms o’er the heaving sea,
And pray’d aloud, in my agony,
That Love’s pure spirit might with me dwell—
Then rose the waves with a murmuring swell,
Higher and higher, till nought was seen
Where slept in beauty that islet green.
The waters pass’d o’er me,—the spell was broke;
From the dream of the lonely isle I woke,
With a heart redeem’d from its selfish stain,
To mingle in scenes of the world again
With cheerful spirit—and rather share
The pains and sorrows which mortals bear,
Than dwell where no shade on my path is thrown,
’Mid fadeless flowers and bright gems, alone.
Philadelphia.
* * * * *
LINES.
Why do we live? Is it to fade
From glory to the tomb,
Wrapt in its melancholy shade,
Inheritors of gloom?
Struck like the stars from Heav’n we die:
Quench’d is the spirit’s light;
Youth’s cheer and Hope’s sweet melody
Are hush’d in sorrow’s night.
Why are we here! but to depart?
’Tis anguish thus to fade.
Shall grief oppress a single heart
When we are lowly laid?
Thank God! th’ immortal soul no blight
Of earth can e’er decay;
On high, to realms of endless light
It flashes far away.
* * * * *
THE HEAD AND THE HEART.
BY W. LANDOR.
“This is certainly the most charming opera that was ever produced,” said
Mrs. Althorp, as the curtain fell after the first act of Sonnambula, and
she turned round to entertain the company in her box; “yet, after all,
what an absurdity it is! However, I must remember that I am growing
old.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Hartford, who sat behind her, “elegance and beauty
have no age.”
“Surely elegance has its Age, and it is that in which Mr. Hartford
lives.”
“Mrs. Althorp’s _fiat_ has, indeed, such potency that it can make even
me, in fact at least, the model of elegance.”
“My stamp,” she replied, “like that of the mint, only ascertains the
value of the metal.”
“But, in the mint of fashion which you administer, there is such a
seignorage as makes the coin far more valuable than the bullion.”
“Mr. Hartford, you talk operas,” said Mrs. Althorp, who knew she could
never beat him in the charming absurdities of compliment, and was
willing to retire from the contest.
“What do you think of the Prima Donna to-night?” said Miss Stanhope.
“I think she has miscarried in nothing but her singing, her acting and
her speaking,” replied Mr. Hartford.
“She certainly does not sing as well as she did. She has sung too much;
her voice is worn out.”
“You were speaking of the absurdity of the opera, Mrs. Althorp,” said
Hartford. “The matter has certainly not been improved since the time
when the Earl of Chesterfield settled it, that when you go to the opera,
you must take leave of your understanding and your senses with your half
guinea at the door, and give yourself up to the dominion of the ears and
eyes; in other words, you must live by sight, and not by faith. But the
repugnancy to reason is increased by the manner of performing them in
this country, where part of the dialogue is spoken. The illusion of the
opera is by that means destroyed. You may in time become accustomed to a
race of beings whose natural dialect is poetry, and whose common
cadences are music; but a set of people who let us see from time to time
that they can talk like ourselves, and who yet, whenever they are
excited, break out into modulated strains of song—who speak their
common-places, and warble their exclamations—such people shock our
credulity.”
“Yet it would seem that at Athens, where they knew something about these
things,” said Mr. Temple, “the same confusion of the natural and the
impossible prevailed on the stage. The chorus usually chanted its part,
and was accompanied by music; and as we find that the persons of the
drama, in conversing with them, frequently adopt the measure of verse
which they sung, we must suppose that the former at such times sang. The
chorus also often employs the rhythm which was used in speaking, and
thus seems to have used the double dialect of recitation and singing.
Nay, the chorus, as it circled the altar, employed a gliding step which
resembled dancing; so that the Greek drama partook of the threefold
nature of our tragedy, opera and ballet.”
“I have lost all my respect for the taste of the Greeks,” said Mrs.
Althorpe, “since I heard that they painted their temples.”
“It was savage, indeed, to paint their temples,” said Mr. Hartford; “the
more refined moderns only paint their cheeks.”
“The French are the modern Athenians,” said Miss Stanhope. “De
Bourrienne says that the soldiers who were with Napoleon in Egypt
complained bitterly of their privations, and longed especially for the
opera.”
“Do you know who that person is that is talking to the leader of the
orchestra?” said Miss Stanhope, directing the attention of Mrs. Althorpe
to a young man of very striking appearance, who stood just within the
door of the orchestra, and who seemed to be giving some directions that
were listened to with great attention.
“Oh! that is Mr. Nivernois,” said Mrs. Althorpe; “a very odd person, by
the by; I intended to have sent for him to sup with us to-night.”
After a few moments, the door of the box opened, and Mr. Nivernois came
in. There was something very remarkable in his appearance: regular,
well-chiselled features, of an Italian cast; pale complexion; large,
black, vivid eyes, and long, straight black hair; in his countenance was
an aspect of force and fire, keen intellectual action, and the power of
deep passion. He was negligently dressed, and was very careless in his
manner.
“This opera does not seem to be very popular to-night,” said Mrs.
Althorpe to him. “And yet it is a fine one.”
“Nay,” he replied, “if you were to set Austerlitz or the Angel Gabriel
to music, people would still complain.”
He turned round to Mr. Hartford, and began to put to him a variety of
questions about music, with such rapidity as gave him no time to answer
one of them. Hartford was ambitious to display his knowledge, and would
have been glad to confound his interrogator by his superior taste. But
the answer which he had begun to one question was cut off by another,
and before that could be attended to, a third had succeeded. When the
string was ended, he was so perplexed as to what he should reply to, and
so stunned by the fiery fervor of the questioning, that he remained
silent.
Nivernois fixed his keen eyes upon him, and waited an instant for the
reply, which came not. He then turned aside.
“Humph!” said he; “for my part, I know nothing of music; not I. I
thought I did, until I played three months every morning with Paganini.
I would not give up the struggle sooner. At the end of that time I broke
my fiddle, and abandoned fiddling forever. It was necessary to do that,
or throttle the old hair-scraper. I should strangle with anguish in my
chair, if I knew that there was a man living who could excel me in any
thing I undertook. But what can one do? We have but one life to live. We
are like felons, fumbling with a bunch of keys at the outer door of the
sanctuary of immortality, while the police of death are hurrying after
us round the corner; and who knows whether he has got the right key? No
lasting fame can be founded on music. No melody is immortal but that of
the drum and the cannon. That alone is eternally re-produced. How the
Corsican knew to touch that instrument!—the Handel of the iron flute!
What brave tunes they played off at Borodino and at Eylau! What a
concert was given under the pyramids—the companies in squares, the
musicians at the angles, and the shod feet of the Mameluke cavalry
marking time upon the crusted sand! For the rest, what composer is there
whom you recognise as _great_—whose name rushes on the breathless soul,
and echoes through the spirit with a sound like thunder, or the voice of
Milton? Fashions vary; tastes change. Who plays Purcell?—who sings
Arne? The musician cannot throw himself upon that broad, unchanging
instinct of popular judgment which, after the subtleties of criticism
are exhausted and the disputes of the schools are at an end, must decide
upon questions of taste, and to which literary creators may directly
appeal. The _people_ cannot get at music to judge of it. Overtures
cannot play themselves; and the professors, whose taste is corrupted by
the over-refinements of science, take good care that the world at large
shall not hear that great, universal music of a past age which would
sweep away their conspiracies against taste. Lightning itself would go
out of fashion, and thunder be pronounced exploded, if you could prevent
the people from hearing them; if the learned had the playing of them,
they would swear to us that steam-guns and rockets were more sublime.
Still it is better to compose good choruses than to write bad poetry,
like the great Frederic, or read worse, like Napoleon. We must multiply
and spin out the offices of life. We must cram full the charge of life,
if we would have a loud report. We must coin sleep into immortality, and
mould the waste of leisure into stars of glory. We have but one life to
live.”
The curtain rose, but Mr. Nivernois still went on with his harangue.
There presently occurred in the opera a passage of extraordinary beauty,
and Mrs. Althorpe began to be annoyed by the unceasing voice behind her.
Her impatience presently got the better of her courtesy.
“Tell Mr. Thingembob there to hush,” said she to Mr. Temple.
But the discourse still continued, and above the rapid din of words
could be occasionally heard, “Napoleon,” “genius,” and “We have but one
life to live.”
Mrs. Althorpe turned round.
“Mr. Nivernois, hush!”
Mr. Nivernois was silent. Mrs. Althorpe relented of her severity, and
began to fear that the unfortunate man might pine away in despair under
the infliction of her rebuke. She turned round again with one of her
most gracious smiles, and begged the favor of his company at supper
after the opera.
The passage in the play struck most of the company in the box as new;
they did not remember to have heard it at the previous representations
of the opera. The house seemed to agree with them as to its beauty. It
was called for a second and even a third time, and the applause was loud
and long.
“What do you think of that?” said Mrs. Althorpe to Nivernois.
“Read the prophecies of Isaiah to this people,” he replied; “if they
applaud that fittingly, I should think their praise of this worth
something.”
In a few moments, he left the box. Presently the leader of the orchestra
came in, between the acts.
“I thought I saw Mr. Nivernois here.”
“He has just gone. But where did you get that magnificent passage you
just played? It surely does not belong to the play.”
“You are indebted to Mr. Nivernois for it. He gave me, the other day, a
mass of musical manuscripts of his own composition. I picked this out of
them, not as being by any means the best, but the most suited for
insertion in this play. He has more genius than all the men I have ever
seen put together; but he has abandoned composition, because he says it
is impossible to beat Bellini. The violin that I played with to-night
was presented to him by Paganini, as a mark of his admiration; he gave
it to me.”
“I wonder that he would part with such a gift,” said Miss Stanhope.
“I believe that he gave it to me,” said the other, “lest he should seem
to himself to value the tribute of any man.”
“What a singular person he must be!” said Miss Stanhope, who had been
much struck with his appearance, and greatly interested by the oddness
and novelty of his character.
The company which had formed Mrs. Althorpe’s _cortège_ at the opera,
together with two or three other invited guests, were seated around her
small but elegant supper-table. A double circle of wax candles in an
_or-molu_ chandelier, which hung over the centre of it, cast their pure
white light upon the numerous silver dishes and richly cut glass which
covered it. After a little while, Mr. Nivernois strode into the room. He
was a small man, and the strides which he made were as long as himself.
He took his place in a vacant seat which had been reserved for him,
opposite to Miss Stanhope. They were talking about Napoleon. He listened
in silence, till a pause occurred.
“When nature had finished making the devils,” said he, pouring out for
himself a capacious goblet of Chambertin, “it threw together all the
rubbish that remained, and out of it formed Napoleon.”
Miss Stanhope laughed. “Do you mean that for praise or censure, Mr.
Nivernois?”
“Napoleon’s soul,” he replied, “was something larger than to be
enkernelled in the shell of any definition. Put together all the moral
epithets the lexicons furnish, of wisdom and of folly, of greatness and
of littleness, of magnanimity and meanness, force and feebleness, and
every thing else, and fling the whole mass, in a lump, at his character,
and you may have some chance of hitting the mark. It would be difficult
to say anything of him that would be wholly false; impossible to say
anything altogether true. When you have circumnavigated him, you have
sailed round the whole world. His character was somewhat like the poet’s
vision of the temple of Fame. On one side you behold the severe and
classic beauty of a Doric front, with images of antique strength and
grace: on another, the grandeur and the gloom of a Gothic structure: on
a third, the pride and splendor and magnificent exaggeration of Eastern
pomp: on the fourth, the dull, impenetrable mystery of Egypt. His spirit
was as various as the morning sky, and his chamberlain, on two
successive days, never woke up the same man. The truth is, his life was
an acted drama; not of the Æschylus kind, with some unity in it, but a
Nat Lee drama of five-and-twenty acts. If we take it that he displayed
his sincere character, and was that which he appeared to be, we must
conclude that he was a glorious fool, among greater fools; a madman,
whose frenzy was, however, the fatality of Europe. So viewed, he was
born for bombast, as a trout for rising; his sentences have not a grain
of sense to five quarts of syllables; a fortunate adventurer, who
appeared at such a conjuncture of politics that his daring served him
for talent, his selfishness for sagacity, his passion for power. But I
suppose that Bonaparte always wore the buskin; that the historical
Napoleon was but a character which the real one put on to dazzle and
delude the fancies of men, and fire their passions, till, drunk as with
wine, they might be bound and led by him. In his own more actual being,
he was a cold, calculating, shrewd and wholly interested schemer. His
performances were always for the author’s benefit. This Garrick
sometimes blundered in the assumed characters in which he spent his
life. He too frequently mistook ferocity for majesty; imagined he was
royal when he was only brutal, and thought he was playing the hero when
he was only playing the fool. He assumed the madman, generally, when he
dealt with men, and only put on the blackguard when he talked to women.
He knew the truth of Bacon’s saying that there is in human nature more
of the fool than of the wise, and that that which addresses itself to
the foolish part of men’s minds will prevail over that which speaks to
the wiser. He built a great temple of delusion, in which he, the priest,
should continually shout “Glory,” and all the people answer “Amen.” His
breast was a natural mirror and antitype of all the passions and follies
of the fools called Frenchmen. By studying his own foolishness, he knew
what ropes to pull to make their fool’s bells jingle. He is, therefore,
of the weaknesses and worser powers of men, the ablest metaphysician
that has appeared. One of his remarks opens the mind, as snuff opens the
head. He was a poet in practice. Sydney’s rule, “Fool! look into thy
heart and write,” he obeyed; and wrote empires. Of course, an
adventitious power like this cannot be measured; in fact, when supplied
by so seething a fancy and so combining an intellect as he had, it is
altogether illimitable; he had only to conceive a new idea to possess a
new power. He therefore belongs to that class of men of whom Du Quesnay
has said that one and one make a hundred and eleven. When you can define
the genius of Shakspeare, you will be able to describe the _character_
of Napoleon; the two things are cognate. As we see him, he was not an
entity, but a mere crystallization of ideas, which were continually
depositing around him like the successive layers of an oyster shell. A
philosophical Haüy might split off crystal after crystal of ideas, and
he would find the ultimate crystal still an idea. Every thing of him was
visionary, and not substance. Squeeze him in your hand, and he crushes
like a dandy’s locks. Try that process on such a man as Wellington, and
you soon feel the bone. In sooth, the Duke is all bone.”
“But you would not think of comparing Wellington and Napoleon,” said Mr.
Temple.
“No more than I would compare the frothy forms of the rock with the
granite substance of the Alps. There are some sentiments,” said he, with
a fervent, suppressed tone, “which lie so deep within us that they seem
to be a part of our souls; in me, veneration of Wellington is such.
Since the Duke of Marlborough was buried, there has not lived, nor lives
there, a man to whom I bow with an entire reverence, excepting
Wellington. When I stood face to face with him, I felt how truly Scott
had said that he was the only man in whose presence he felt himself
nothing.”
“But do you think that he has Bonaparte’s genius?”
“Perhaps not; but where you see a man who is great without genius, you
see the greatest kind of man the world knows any thing of; and where you
see a poet who prevails without passion, you see an order of poetry high
and enduring; such, on the one hand, is Wellington; on the other, Pope.
All that such men do is done by force of intellect and might of
character, and the results are true and permanent.”
“No doubt the Duke is a great man.”