OUR LAST SHORE-DINNER.
The next day was very lovely. I think it is the last of the kind of which
I shall have occasion to write in my narrative of the Seaboard Parish. I
wonder if my readers are tired of so much about the common things of
Nature. I reason about it something in this way: We are so easily affected
by the smallest things that are of the unpleasant kind, that we ought to
train ourselves to the influence of those that are of an opposite nature.
The unpleasant ones are like the thorns which make themselves felt as we
scramble--for we often do scramble in a very undignified manner--through
the thickets of life; and, feeling the thorns, we grumble, and are blind
to all but the thorns. The flowers, and the lovely leaves, and the red
berries, and the clusters of filberts, and the birds'-nests do not force
themselves upon our attention as the thorns do, and the thorns make us
forget to look for them. But a scratch would be forgotten--and that in
mental hurts is often equivalent to a cure, for a forgotten scratch on the
mind or heart will never fester--if we but allowed our being a moment's
repose upon any of the quiet, waiting, unobtrusive beauties that lie
around the half-trodden way, offering their gentle healing. And when I
think how, not unfrequently, otherwise noble characters are anything but
admirable when under the influence of trifling irritations, the very
paltriness of which seems what the mind, which would at once rouse itself
to a noble endurance of any mighty evil, is unable to endure, I would
gladly help so with sweet antidotes to defeat the fly in the ointment of
the apothecary that the whole pot shall send forth a pure savour. We ought
for this to cultivate the friendships of little things. Beauty is one of
the surest antidotes to vexation. Often when life looked dreary about me,
from some real or fancied injustice or indignity, has a thought of truth
been flashed into my mind from a flower, a shape of frost, or even a
lingering shadow--not to mention such glories as angel-winged clouds,
rainbows, stars, and sunrises. Therefore I hope that in my loving delay
over such aspects of Nature as impressed themselves upon me in this most
memorable part of my history I shall not prove wearisome to my reader, for
therein I should utterly contravene my hope and intent in the recording of
them.
This day there was to be an unusually low tide, and we had reckoned on
enlarging our acquaintance with the bed of the ocean--of knowing a few
yards more of the millions of miles lapt in the mystery of waters. It was
to be low water about two o'clock, and we resolved to dine upon the sands.
But all the morning the children were out playing on the threshold of old
Neptune's palace; for in his quieter mood he will, like a fierce
mastiff, let children do with him what they will. I gave myself a whole
holiday--sometimes the most precious part of my life both for myself and
those for whom I labour--and wandered about on the shore, now passing the
children, and assailed with a volley of cries and entreaties to look at
this one's castle and that one's ditch, now leaving them behind, with what
in its ungraduated flatness might well enough personate an endless
desert of sand between, over the expanse of which I could imagine them
disappearing on a far horizon, whence however a faint occasional cry of
excitement and pleasure would reach my ears. The sea was so calm, and the
shore so gently sloping, that you could hardly tell where the sand ceased
and the sea began--the water sloped to such a thin pellicle, thinner
than any knife-edge, upon the shining brown sand, and you saw the sand
underneath the water to such a distance out. Yet this depth, which would
not drown a red spider, was the ocean. In my mind I followed that bed of
shining sand, bared of its hiding waters, out and out, till I was lost in
an awful wilderness of chasms, precipices, and mountain-peaks, in whose
caverns the sea-serpent may dwell, with his breath of pestilence; the
kraken, with "his skaly rind," may there be sleeping
"His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep,"
while
"faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides,"
as he lies
"Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep."
There may lie all the horrors that Schiller's diver encountered--the
frightful Molch, and that worst of all, to which he gives no name, which
came creeping with a hundred knots at once; but here are only the gracious
rainbow-woven shells, an evanescent jelly or two, and the queer baby-crabs
that crawl out from the holes of the bordering rocks. What awful gradations
of gentleness lead from such as these down to those cabins where wallow
the inventions of Nature's infancy, when, like a child of untutored
imagination, she drew on the slate of her fancy creations in which flitting
shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the shuddering, gruesome horror.
The sweet sun and air, the hand of man, and the growth of the ages, have
all but swept such from the upper plains of the earth. What hunter's bow
has twanged, what adventurer's rifle has cracked in those leagues of
mountain-waste, vaster than all the upper world can show, where the beasts
of the ocean "graze the sea-weed, their pasture"! Diana of the silver bow
herself, when she descends into the interlunar caves of hell, sends no such
monsters fleeing from her spells. Yet if such there be, such horrors too
must lie in the undiscovered caves of man's nature, of which all this outer
world is but a typical analysis. By equally slow gradations may the inner
eye descend from the truth of a Cordelia to the falsehood of an Iago. As
these golden sands slope from the sunlight into the wallowing abyss of
darkness, even so from the love of the child to his holy mother slopes the
inclined plane of humanity to the hell of the sensualist. "But with one
difference in the moral world," I said aloud, as I paced up and down on the
shimmering margin, "that everywhere in the scale the eye of the all-seeing
Father can detect the first quiver of the eyelid that would raise itself
heavenward, responsive to his waking spirit." I lifted my eyes in the
relief of the thought, and saw how the sun of the autumn hung above the
waters oppressed with a mist of his own glory; far away to the left a man
who had been clambering on a low rock, inaccessible save in such a tide,
gathering mussels, threw himself into the sea and swam ashore; above his
head the storm-tower stood in the stormless air; the sea glittered and
shone, and the long-winged birds knew not which to choose, the balmy air or
the cool deep, now flitting like arrow-heads through the one, now alighting
eagerly upon the other, to forsake it anew for the thinner element. I
thanked God for his glory.
"O, papa, it's so jolly--so jolly!" shouted the children as I passed them
again.
"What is it that's so jolly, Charlie?" I asked.
"My castle," screeched Harry in reply; "only it's tumbled down. The water
_would_ keep coming in underneath."
"I tried to stop it with a newspaper," cried Charlie, "but it wouldn't. So
we were forced to let it be, and down it went into the ditch."
"We blew it up rather than surrender," said Dora. "We did; only Harry
always forgets, and says it was the water did it."
I drew near the rock that held the bath. I had never approached it from
this side before. It was high above my head, and a stream of water was
flowing from it. I scrambled up, undressed, and plunged into its dark
hollow, where I felt like one of the sea-beasts of which I had been
dreaming, down in the caves of the unvisited ocean. But the sun was over
my head, and the air with an edge of the winter was about me. I dressed
quickly, descended on the other side of the rock, and wandered again on the
sands to seaward of the breakwater, which lay above, looking dry and
weary, and worn with years of contest with the waves, which had at length
withdrawn defeated to their own country, and left it as if to victory and a
useless age of peace. How different was the scene when a raving mountain of
water filled all the hollow where I now wandered, and rushed over the top
of that mole now so high above me; and I had to cling to its stones to keep
me from being carried off like a bit of floating sea-weed! This was the
loveliest and strangest part of the shore. Several long low ridges of rock,
of whose existence I scarcely knew, worn to a level with the sand, hollowed
and channelled with the terrible run of the tide across them, and looking
like the old and outworn cheek-teeth of some awful beast of prey, stretched
out seawards. Here and there amongst them rose a well-known rock, but now
so changed in look by being lifted all the height between the base on the
waters, and the second base in the sand, that I wondered at each, walking
round and viewing it on all sides. It seemed almost a fresh growth out of
the garden of the shore, with uncouth hollows around its fungous root,
and a forsaken air about its brows as it stood in the dry sand and looked
seaward. But what made the chief delight of the spot, closed in by rocks
from the open sands, was the multitude of fairy rivers that flowed across
it to the sea. The gladness these streams gave me I cannot communicate. The
tide had filled thousands of hollows in the breakwater, hundreds of cracked
basins in the rocks, huge sponges of sand; from all of which--from cranny
and crack, and oozing sponge--the water flowed in restricted haste back,
back to the sea, tumbling in tiny cataracts down the faces of the rocks,
bubbling from their roots as from wells, gathering in tanks of sand, and
overflowing in broad shallow streams, curving and sweeping in their sandy
channels, just like, the great rivers of a continent;--here spreading into
smooth silent lakes and reaches, here babbling along in ripples and waves
innumerable--flowing, flowing, to lose their small beings in the same ocean
that met on the other side the waters of the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the
Amazon. All their channels were of golden sand, and the golden sunlight
was above and through and in them all: gold and gold met, with the waters
between. And what gave an added life to their motion was, that all the
ripples made shadows on the clear yellow below them. The eye could not
see the rippling on the surface; but the sun saw it, and drew it in
multitudinous shadowy motion upon the sand, with the play of a thousand
fancies of gold burnished and dead, of sunlight and yellow, trembling,
melting, curving, blending, vanishing ever, ever renewed. It was as if all
the water-marks upon a web of golden silk had been set in wildest yet most
graceful curvilinear motion by the breath of a hundred playful zephyrs. My
eye could not be filled with seeing. I stood in speechless delight for a
while, gazing at the "endless ending" which was "the humour of the game,"
and thinking how in all God's works the laws of beauty are wrought out
in evanishment, in birth and death. There, there is no hoarding, but
an ever-fresh creating, an eternal flow of life from the heart of the
All-beautiful. Hence even the heart of man cannot hoard. His brain or his
hand may gather into its box and hoard; but the moment the thing has passed
into the box, the heart has lost it and is hungry again. If man would
_have,_ it is the giver he must have; the eternal, the original, the
ever-outpouring is alone within his reach; the everlasting _creation_ is
his heritage. Therefore all that he makes must be free to come and go
through the heart of his child; he can enjoy it only as it passes, can
enjoy only its life, its soul, its vision, its meaning, not itself. To
hoard rubies and sapphires is as useless and hopeless for the heart, as if
I were to attempt to hoard this marvel of sand and water and sunlight in
the same iron chest with the musty deeds of my wife's inheritance.
"Father," I murmured half aloud, "thou alone art, and I am because thou
art. Thy will shall be mine."
I know that I must have spoken aloud, because I remember the start of
consciousness and discomposure occasioned by the voice of Percivale
greeting me.
"I beg your pardon," he added; "I did not mean to startle you, Mr. Walton.
I thought you were only looking at Nature's childplay--not thinking."
"I know few things _more_ fit to set one thinking than what you have very
well called Nature's childplay," I returned. "Is Nature very heartless now,
do you think, to go on with this kind of thing at our feet, when away up
yonder lies the awful London, with so many sores festering in her heart?"
"You must answer your own question, Mr. Walton. You know I cannot. I
confess I feel the difficulty deeply. I will go further, and confess that
the discrepancy makes me doubt many things I would gladly believe. I know
_you_ are able to distinguish between a glad unbelief and a sorrowful
doubt."
"Else were I unworthy of the humblest place in the kingdom--unworthy to be
a doorkeeper in the house of my God," I answered, and recoiled from the
sound of my own words; for they seemed to imply that I believed myself
worthy of the position I occupied. I hastened to correct them: "But do not
mistake my thoughts," I said; "I do not dream of worthiness in the way of
honour--only of fitness for the work to be done. For that I think God has
fitted me in some measure. The doorkeeper's office may be given him, not
because he has done some great deed worthy of the honour, but because he
can sweep the porch and scour the threshold, and will, in the main, try to
keep them clean. That is all the worthiness I dare to claim, even to hope
that I possess."
"No one who knows you can mistake your words, except wilfully," returned
Percivale courteously.
"Thank you," I said. "Now I will just ask you, in reference to the contrast
between human life and nature, how you will go back to your work in London,
after seeing all this child's and other play of Nature? Suppose you had
had nothing here but rain and high winds and sea-fogs, would you have been
better fitted for doing something to comfort those who know nothing of such
influences than you will be now? One of the most important qualifications
of a sick-nurse is a ready smile. A long-faced nurse in a sickroom is a
visible embodiment and presence of the disease against which the eager life
of the patient is fighting in agony. Such ought to be banished, with their
black dresses and their mourning-shop looks, from every sick-chamber, and
permitted to minister only to the dead, who do not mind looks. With what a
power of life and hope does a woman--young or old I do not care--with a
face of the morning, a dress like the spring, a bunch of wild flowers in
her hand, with the dew upon them, and perhaps in her eyes too (I don't
object to that--that is sympathy, not the worship of darkness),--with
what a message from nature and life does she, looking death in the face
with a smile, dawn upon the vision of the invalid! She brings a little
health, a little strength to fight, a little hope to endure, actually lapt
in the folds of her gracious garments; for the soul itself can do more than
any medicine, if it be fed with the truth of life."
"But are you not--I beg your pardon for interposing on your eloquence with
dull objection," said Percivale--"are you not begging all the question?
_Is_ life such an affair of sunshine and gladness?"
"If life is not, then I confess all this show of nature is worse than
vanity--it is a vile mockery. Life is gladness; it is the death in it that
makes the misery. We call life-in-death life, and hence the mistake. If
gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow, against which
we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We recognise it as
death--the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but for a recognition
of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must be life. It is of the
nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is nothing until the light
comes. This very childplay, as you call it, of Nature, is her assertion of
the secret that life is the deepest, that life shall conquer death. Those
who believe this must bear the good news to them that sit in darkness and
the shadow of death. Our Lord has conquered death--yea, the moral death
that he called the world; and now, having sown the seed of light, the
harvest is springing in human hearts, is springing in this dance of
radiance, and will grow and grow until the hearts of the children of the
kingdom shall frolic in the sunlight of the Father's presence. Nature has
God at her heart; she is but the garment of the Invisible. God wears his
singing robes in a day like this, and says to his children, 'Be not afraid:
your brothers and sisters up there in London are in my hands; go and help
them. I am with you. Bear to them the message of joy. Tell them to be of
good cheer: I have overcome the world. Tell them to endure hunger, and not
sin; to endure passion, and not yield; to admire, and not desire. Sorrow
and pain are serving my ends; for by them will I slay sin; and save my
children.'"
"I wish I could believe as you do, Mr. Walton."
"I wish you could. But God will teach you, if you are willing to be
taught."
"I desire the truth, Mr. Walton."
"God bless you! God is blessing you," I said.
"Amen," returned Percivale devoutly; and we strolled away together in
silence towards the cliffs.
The recession of the tide allowed us to get far enough away from the face
of the rocks to see the general effect. With the lisping of the inch-deep
wavelets at our heels we stood and regarded the worn yet defiant, the
wasted and jagged yet reposeful face of the guardians of the shore.
"Who could imagine, in weather like this, and with this baby of a tide
lying behind us, low at our feet, and shallow as the water a schoolboy
pours upon his slate to wash it withal, that those grand cliffs before
us bear on their front the scars and dints of centuries, of chiliads of
stubborn resistance, of passionate contest with this same creature that is
at this moment unable to rock the cradle of an infant? Look behind you, at
your feet, Mr. Percivale; look before you at the chasms, rents, caves, and
hollows of those rocks."
"I wish you were a painter, Mr. Walton," he said.
"I wish I were," I returned. "At least I know I should rejoice in it, if it
had been given me to be one. But why do you say so now?"
"Because you have always some individual predominating idea, which
would give interpretation to Nature while it gave harmony, reality, and
individuality to your representation of her."
"I know what you mean," I answered; "but I have no gift whatever in that
direction. I have no idea of drawing, or of producing the effects of light
and shade; though I think I have a little notion of colour--perhaps about
as much as the little London boy, who stopped a friend of mine once to ask
the way to the field where the buttercups grew, had of nature."
"I wish I could ask your opinion of some of my pictures."
"That I should never presume to give. I could only tell you what they made
me feel, or perhaps only think. Some day I may have the pleasure of looking
at them."
"May I offer you my address?" he said, and took a card from his
pocket-book. "It is a poor place, but if you should happen to think of
me when you are next in London, I shall be honoured by your paying me a
visit."
"I shall be most happy," I returned, taking his card.--"Did it ever occur
to you, in reference to the subject we were upon a few minutes ago, how
little you can do without shadow in making a picture?"
"Little indeed," answered Percivale. "In fact, it would be no picture at
all."
"I doubt if the world would fare better without its shadows."
"But it would be a poor satisfaction, with regard to the nature of God, to
be told that he allowed evil for artistic purposes."
"It would indeed, if you regard the world as a picture. But if you think of
his art as expended, not upon the making of a history or a drama, but upon
the making of an individual, a being, a character, then I think a great
part of the difficulty concerning the existence of evil which oppresses you
will vanish. So long as a creature has not sinned, sin is possible to him.
Does it seem inconsistent with the character of God that in order that sin
should become impossible he should allow sin to come? that, in order that
his creatures should choose the good and refuse the evil, in order that
they might become such, with their whole nature infinitely enlarged, as to
turn from sin with a perfect repugnance of the will, he should allow them
to fall? that, in order that, from being sweet childish children, they
should become noble, child-like men and women, he should let them try to
walk alone? Why should he not allow the possible in order that it should
become impossible? for possible it would ever have been, even in the midst
of all the blessedness, until it had been, and had been thus destroyed.
Thus sin is slain, uprooted. And the war must ever exist, it seems to me,
where there is creation still going on. How could I be content to guard my
children so that they should never have temptation, knowing that in all
probability they would fail if at any moment it should cross their path?
Would the deepest communion of father and child ever be possible between
us? Evil would ever seem to be in the child, so long as it was possible it
should be there developed. And if this can be said for the existence of
moral evil, the existence of all other evil becomes a comparative trifle;
nay, a positive good, for by this the other is combated."
"I think I understand you," returned Percivale. "I will think over what you
have said. These are very difficult questions."
"Very. I don't think argument is of much use about them, except as it may
help to quiet a man's uneasiness a little, and so give his mind peace to
think about duty. For about the doing of duty there can be no question,
once it is seen. And the doing of duty is the shortest--in very fact, the
only way into the light."
As we spoke, we had turned from the cliffs, and wandered back across the
salt streams to the sands beyond. From the direction of the house came
a little procession of servants, with Walter at their head, bearing the
preparations for our dinner--over the gates of the lock, down the sides of
the embankment of the canal, and across the sands, in the direction of the
children, who were still playing merrily.
"Will you join our early dinner, which is to be out of doors, as you see,
somewhere hereabout on the sands?" I said.
"I shall be delighted," he answered, "if you will let me be of some use
first. I presume you mean to bring your invalid out."
"Yes; and you shall help me to carry her, if you will."
"That is what I hoped," said Percivale; and we went together towards the
parsonage.
As we approached, I saw Wynnie sitting at the drawing-room window; but when
we entered the room, she was gone. My wife was there, however.
"Where is Wynnie?" I asked.
"She saw you coming," she answered, "and went to get Connie ready; for I
guessed Mr. Percivale had come to help you to carry her out."
But I could not help doubting there might be more than that in Wynnie's
disappearance. "What if she should have fallen in love with him," I
thought, "and he should never say a word on the subject? That would be
dreadful for us all."
They had been repeatedly but not very much together of late, and I was
compelled to allow to myself that if they did fall in love with each other
it would be very natural on both sides, for there was evidently a great
mental resemblance between them, so that they could not help sympathising
with each other's peculiarities. And anyone could see what a fine couple
they would make.
Wynnie was much taller than Connie--almost the height of her mother. She
had a very fair skin, and brown hair, a broad forehead, a wise, thoughtful,
often troubled face, a mouth that seldom smiled, but on which a smile
seemed always asleep, and round soft cheeks that dimpled like water when
she did smile. I have described Percivale before. Why should not two such
walk together along the path to the gates of the light? And yet I could
not help some anxiety. I did not know anything of his history. I had no
testimony concerning him from anyone that knew him. His past life was a
blank to me; his means of livelihood probably insufficient--certainly,
I judged, precarious; and his position in society--but there I checked
myself: I had had enough of that kind of thing already. I would not
willingly offend in that worldliness again. The God of the whole earth
could not choose that I should look at such works of his hands after that
fashion. And I was his servant--not Mammon's or Belial's.
All this passed through my mind in about three turns of the winnowing-fan
of thought. Mr. Percivale had begun talking to my wife, who took no pains
to conceal that his presence was pleasant to her, and I went upstairs,
almost unconsciously, to Connie's room.
When I opened the door, forgetting to announce my approach as I ought to
have done, I saw Wynnie leaning over Connie, and Connie's arm round her
waist. Wynnie started back, and Connie gave a little cry, for the jerk thus
occasioned had hurt her. Wynnie had turned her head away, but turned it
again at Connie's cry, and I saw a tear on her face.
"My darlings, I beg your pardon," I said. "It was very stupid of me not to
knock at the door."
Connie looked up at me with large resting eyes, and said--
"It's nothing, papa, Wynnie is in one of her gloomy moods, and didn't want
you to see her crying. She gave me a little pull, that was all. It didn't
hurt me much, only I'm such a goose! I'm in terror before the pain comes.
Look at me," she added, seeing, doubtless, some perturbation on my
countenance, "I'm all right now." And she smiled in my face perfectly.
I turned to Wynnie, put my arm about her, kissed her cheek, and left the
room. I looked round at the door, and saw that Connie was following me with
her eyes, but Wynnie's were hidden in her handkerchief.
I went back to the drawing-room, and in a few minutes Walter came to
announce that dinner was about to be served. The same moment Wynnie came to
say that Connie was ready. She did not lift her eyes, or approach to
give Percivale any greeting, but went again as soon as she had given her
message. I saw that he looked first concerned and then thoughtful.
"Come, Mr. Percivale," I said; and he followed me up to Connie's room.
Wynnie was not there; but Connie lay, looking lovely, all ready for going.
We lifted her, and carried her by the window out on the down, for the
easiest way, though the longest, was by the path to the breakwater, along
its broad back and down from the end of it upon the sands. Before we
reached the breakwater, I found that Wynnie was following behind us. We
stopped in the middle of it, and set Connie down, as if I wanted to take
breath. But I had thought of something to say to her, which I wanted Wynnie
to hear without its being addressed to her.
"Do you see, Connie," I said, "how far off the water is?"
"Yes, papa; it is a long way off. I wish I could get up and run down to
it."
"You can hardly believe that all between, all those rocks, and all that
sand, will be covered before sunset."
"I know it will be. But it doesn't _look_ likely, does it, papa!"
"Not the least likely, my dear. Do you remember that stormy night when I
came through your room to go out for a walk in the dark?"
"Remember it, papa? I cannot forget it. Every time I hear the wind blowing
when I wake in the night I fancy you are out in it, and have to wake myself
up' quite to get rid of the thought."
"Well, Connie, look down into the great hollow there, with rocks and sand
at the bottom of it, stretching far away."
"Yes, papa."
"Now look over the side of your litter. You see those holes all about
between the stones?"
"Yes, papa."
"Well, one of those little holes saved my life that night, when the great
gulf there was full of huge mounds of roaring water, which rushed across
this breakwater with force enough to sweep a whole cavalry regiment off its
back."
"Papa!" exclaimed Connie, turning pale.
Then first I told her all the story. And Wynnie listened behind.
"Then I _was_ right in being frightened, papa!" cried Connie, bursting into
tears; for since her accident she could not well command her feelings.
"You were right in trusting in God, Connie."
"But you might have been drowned, papa!" she sobbed.
"Nobody has a right to say that anything might have been other than what
has been. Before a thing has happened we can say might or might not; but
that has to do only with our ignorance. Of course I am not speaking
of things wherein we ought to exercise will and choice. That is _our_
department. But this does not look like that now, does it? Think what a
change--from the dark night and the roaring water to this fulness of
sunlight and the bare sands, with the water lisping on their edge away
there in the distance. Now, I want you to think that in life troubles will
come which look as if they would never pass away; the night and the storm
look as if they would last for ever; but the calm and the morning cannot be
stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of Nature,
as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is
Peace."
"But if you will excuse me, Mr. Walton," said Percivale, "you can hardly
expect experience to be of use to any but those who have had it. It seems
to me that its influences cannot be imparted."
"That depends on the amount of faith in those to whom its results are
offered. Of course, as experience, it can have no weight with another; for
it is no longer experience. One remove, and it ceases. But faith in the
person who has experienced can draw over or derive--to use an old Italian
word--some of its benefits to him who has the faith. Experience may thus,
in a sense, be accumulated, and we may go on to fresh experience of our
own. At least I can hope that the experience of a father may take the form
of hope in the minds of his daughters. Hope never hurt anyone, never yet
interfered with duty; nay, always strengthens to the performance of duty,
gives courage, and clears the judgment. St. Paul says we are saved by hope.
Hope is the most rational thing in the universe. Even the ancient poets,
who believed it was delusive, yet regarded it as an antidote given by the
mercy of the gods against some, at least, of the ills of life."
"But they counted it delusive. A wise man cannot consent to be deluded."
"Assuredly not. The sorest truth rather than a false hope! But what is a
false hope? Only one that ought not to be fulfilled. The old poets could
give themselves little room for hope, and less for its fulfilment; for what
were the gods in whom they believed--I cannot say in whom they trusted?
Gods who did the best their own poverty of being was capable of doing for
men when they gave them the _illusion_ of hope. But I see they are waiting
for us below. One thing I repeat--the waves that foamed across the spot
where we now stand are gone away, have sunk and vanished."
"But they will come again, papa," faltered Wynnie.
"And God will come with them, my love," I said, as we lifted the litter.
In a few minutes more we were all seated on the sand around a table-cloth
spread upon it. I shall never forgot the peace and the light outside and
in, as far as I was concerned at least, and I hope the others too, that
afternoon. The tide had turned, and the waves were creeping up over the
level, soundless almost as thought; but it would be time to go home long
before they had reached us. The sun was in the western half of the sky, and
now and then a breath of wind came from the sea, with a slight saw-edge in
it, but not enough to hurt. Connie could stand much more in that way now.
And when I saw how she could move herself on her couch, and thought how
much she had improved since first she was laid upon it, hope for her kept
fluttering joyously in my heart. I could not help fancying even that I saw
her move her legs a little; but I could not be in the least sure; and she,
if she did move them, was clearly unconscious of it. Charles and Harry were
every now and then starting up from their dinner and running off with a
shout, to return with apparently increased appetite for the rest of it;
and neither their mother nor I cared to interfere with the indecorum. Dora
alone took it upon her to rebuke them. Wynnie was very silent, but looked
more cheerful. Connie seemed full of quiet bliss. My wife's face was a
picture of heavenly repose. The old nurse was walking about with the baby,
occasionally with one hand helping the other servants to wait upon us.
They, too, seemed to have a share in the gladness of the hour, and, like
Ariel, did their spiriting gently.
"This is the will of God," I said, after the things were removed, and we
had sat for a few moments in silence.
"What is the will of God, husband?" asked Ethelwyn.
"Why, this, my love," I answered; "this living air, and wind, and sea,
and light, and land all about us; this consenting, consorting harmony of
Nature, that mirrors a like peace in our souls. The perfection of such
visions, the gathering of them all in one was, is, I should say, in the
face of Christ Jesus. You will say that face was troubled sometimes. Yes,
but with a trouble that broke not the music, but deepened the harmony.
When he wept at the grave of Lazarus, you do not think it was for Lazarus
himself, or for his own loss of him, that he wept? That could not be,
seeing he had the power to call him back when he would. The grief was for
the poor troubled hearts left behind, to whom it was so dreadful because
they had not faith enough in his Father, the God of life and love, who was
looking after it all, full of tenderness and grace, with whom Lazarus was
present and blessed. It was the aching, loving heart of humanity for which
he wept, that needed God so awfully, and could not yet trust in him. Their
brother was only hidden in the skirts of their Father's garment, but they
could not believe that: they said he was dead--lost--away--all gone, as
the children say. And it was so sad to think of a whole world full of the
grief of death, that he could not bear it without the human tears to help
his heart, as they help ours. It was for our dark sorrows that he wept. But
the peace could be no less plain on the face that saw God. Did you ever
think of that wonderful saying: 'Again a little while, and ye shall see
me, because I go to the Father'? The heart of man would have joined the
'because I go to the Father' with the former result--the not seeing of him.
The heart of man is not able, without more and more light, to understand
that all vision is in the light of the Father. Because Jesus went to the
Father, therefore the disciples saw him tenfold more. His body no longer in
their eyes, his very being, his very self was in their hearts--not in their
affections only--in their spirits, their heavenly consciousness."
As I said this, a certain hymn, for which I had and have an especial
affection, came into my mind, and, without prologue or introduction, I
repeated it:
"If I Him but have,
If he be but mine,
If my heart, hence to the grave,
Ne'er forgets his love divine--
Know I nought of sadness,
Feel I nought but worship, love, and gladness.
If I Him but have,
Glad with all I part;
Follow on my pilgrim staff
My Lord only, with true heart;
Leave them, nothing saying,
On broad, bright, and crowded highways straying.
If I Him but have,
Glad I fall asleep;
Aye the flood that his heart gave
Strength within my heart shall keep,
And with soft compelling
Make it tender, through and through it swelling.
If I Him but have,
Mine the world I hail!
Glad as cherub smiling grave,
Holding back the virgin's veil.
Sunk and lost in seeing,
Earthly fears have died from all my being.
Where I have but Him
Is my Fatherland;
And all gifts and graces come
Heritage into my hand:
Brothers long deplored
I in his disciples find restored."
"What a lovely hymn, papa!" exclaimed Connie. She could always speak more
easily than either her mother or sister. "Who wrote it?"
"Friedrich von Hardenberg, known, where he is known, as Novalis."
"But he must have written it in German. Did you translate it?"
"Yes. You will find, I think, that I have kept form, thought, and feeling,
however I may have failed in making an English poem of it."
"O, you dear papa, it is lovely! Is it long since you did it?"
"Years before you were born, Connie."
"To think of you having lived so long, and being one of us!" she returned.
"Was he a Roman Catholic, papa?"
"No, he was a Moravian. At least, his parents were. I don't think he
belonged to any section of the church in particular."
"But oughtn't he, papa?"
"Certainly not, my dear, except he saw good reason for it. But what is the
use of asking such questions, after a hymn like that?"
"O, I didn't think anything bad, papa, I assure you. It was only that I
wanted to know more about him."
The tears were in her eyes, and I was sorry I had treated as significant
what was really not so. But the constant tendency to consider Christianity
as associated of necessity with this or that form of it, instead of as
simply obedience to Christ, had grown more and more repulsive to me as I
had grown myself, for it always seemed like an insult to my brethren in
Christ; hence the least hint of it in my children I was too ready to be
down upon like a most unchristian ogre. I took her hand in mine, and she
was comforted, for she saw in my face that I was sorry, and yet she could
see that there was reason at the root of my haste.
"But," said Wynnie, who, I thought afterwards, must have strengthened
herself to speak from the instinctive desire to show Percivale how far she
was from being out of sympathy with what he might suppose formed a barrier
between him and me--"But," she said, "the lovely feeling in that poem
seems to me, as in all the rest of such poems, to belong only to the New
Testament, and have nothing to do with this world round about us. These
things look as if they were only for drawing and painting and being glad
in, not as if they had relations with all those awful and solemn things. As
soon as I try to get the two together, I lose both of them."
"That is because the human mind must begin with one thing and grow to the
rest. At first, Christianity seemed to men to have only to do with their
conscience. That was the first relation, of course. But even with art
it was regarded as having no relation except for the presentment of its
history. Afterwards, men forgot the conscience almost in trying to make
Christianity comprehensible to the understanding. Now, I trust, we are
beginning to see that Christianity is everything or nothing. Either the
whole is a lovely fable setting forth the loftiest longing of the human
soul after the vision of the divine, or it is such a fact as is the heart
not only of theology so called, but of history, politics, science, and art.
The treasures of the Godhead must be hidden in him, and therefore by him
only can be revealed. This will interpret all things, or it has not yet
been. Teachers of men have not taught this, because they have not seen it.
If we do not find him in nature, we may conclude either that we do not
understand the expression of nature, or have mistaken ideas or poor
feelings about him. It is one great business in our life to find the
interpretation which will render this harmony visible. Till we find it, we
have not seen him to be all in all. Recognising a discord when they touched
the notes of nature and society, the hermits forsook the instrument
altogether, and contented themselves with a partial symphony--lofty,
narrow, and weak. Their example, more or less, has been followed by almost
all Christians. Exclusion is so much the easier way of getting harmony
in the orchestra than study, insight, and interpretation, that most have
adopted it. It is for us, and all who have hope in the infinite God, to
widen its basis as we may, to search and find the true tone and right idea,
place, and combination of instruments, until to our enraptured ear they
all, with one voice of multiform yet harmonious utterance, declare the
glory of God and of his Christ."
"A grand idea," said Percivale.
"Therefore likely to be a true one," I returned. "People find it hard
to believe grand things; but why? If there be a God, is it not likely
everything is grand, save where the reflection of his great thoughts is
shaken, broken, distorted by the watery mirrors of our unbelieving and
troubled souls? Things ought to be grand, simple, and noble. The ages of
eternity will go on showing that such they are and ever have been. God will
yet be victorious over our wretched unbeliefs."
I was sitting facing the sea, but with my eyes fixed on the sand, boring
holes in it with my stick, for I could talk better when I did not look my
familiar faces in the face. I did not feel thus in the pulpit; there I
sought the faces of my flock, to assist me in speaking to their needs. As
I drew to the close of my last monologue, a colder and stronger blast from
the sea blew in my face. I lifted my head, and saw that the tide had crept
up a long way, and was coming in fast. A luminous fog had sunk down over
the western horizon, and almost hidden the sun, had obscured the half of
the sea, and destroyed all our hopes of a sunset. A certain veil as of the
commonplace, like that which so often settles down over the spirit of man
after a season of vision and glory and gladness, had dropped over the face
of Nature. The wind came in little bitter gusts across the dull waters. It
was time to lift Connie and take her home.
This was the last time we ate together on the open shore.