THE SOLILOQUY, AND THE CHARACTER, OF A RECLUSE.--THE
INTERRUPTION.
“Or let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,
Or thrice-great Hermes, and unsphere
The spirit of Plato.”
--Milton.--Il Penseroso.
As Aram assisted the beautiful Madeline into the carriage--as he
listened to her sweet voice--as he marked the grateful expression of her
soft eyes--as he felt the slight yet warm pressure of her fairy hand,
that vague sensation of delight which preludes love, for the first time,
in his sterile and solitary life, agitated his breast. Lester held out
his hand to him with a frank cordiality which the scholar could not
resist.
“Do not let us be strangers, Mr. Aram,” said he warmly. “It is not often
that I press for companionship out of my own circle; but in your company
I should find pleasure as well as instruction. Let us break the ice
boldly, and at once. Come and dine with me to-morrow, and Ellinor shall
sing to us in the evening.”
The excuse died upon Aram’s lips. Another glance at Madeline conquered
the remains of his reserve: he accepted the invitation, and he could
not but mark, with an unfamiliar emotion of the heart, that the eyes of
Madeline sparkled as he did so.
With an abstracted air, and arms folded across his breast, he gazed
after the carriage till the winding of the valley snatched it from his
view. He then, waking from his reverie with a start, turned into the
house, and carefully closing and barring the door, mounted with slow
steps to the lofty chamber with which, the better to indulge his
astronomical researches, he had crested his lonely abode.
It was now night. The Heavens broadened round him in all the loving yet
august tranquillity of the season and the hour; the stars bathed the
living atmosphere with a solemn light; and above--about--around--
“The holy time was quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.” He looked
forth upon the deep and ineffable stillness of the night, and indulged
the reflections that it suggested.
“Ye mystic lights,” said he soliloquizing: “worlds upon
worlds--infinite--incalculable.--Bright defiers of rest and change,
rolling for ever above our petty sea of mortality, as, wave after wave,
we fret forth our little life, and sink into the black abyss;--can we
look upon you, note your appointed order, and your unvarying course, and
not feel that we are indeed the poorest puppets of an all-pervading
and resistless destiny? Shall we see throughout creation each marvel
fulfilling its pre-ordered fate--no wandering from its orbit--no
variation in its seasons--and yet imagine that the Arch-ordainer
will hold back the tides He has sent from their unseen source, at our
miserable bidding? Shall we think that our prayers can avert a doom
woven with the skein of events? To change a particle of our fate, might
change the destiny of millions! Shall the link forsake the chain, and
yet the chain be unbroken? Away, then, with our vague repinings, and our
blind demands. All must walk onward to their goal, be he the wisest
who looks not one step behind. The colours of our existence were doomed
before our birth--our sorrows and our crimes;--millions of ages back,
when this hoary earth was peopled by other kinds, yea! ere its atoms
had formed one layer of its present soil, the Eternal and the all-seeing
Ruler of the universe, Destiny, or God, had here fixed the moment of
our birth and the limits of our career. What then is crime?--Fate! What
life?--Submission!”
Such were the strange and dark thoughts which, constituting a part
indeed of his established creed, broke over Aram’s mind. He sought for a
fairer subject for meditation, and Madeline Lester rose before him.
Eugene Aram was a man whose whole life seemed to have been one sacrifice
to knowledge. What is termed pleasure had no attraction for him. From
the mature manhood at which he had arrived, he looked back along his
youth, and recognized no youthful folly. Love he had hitherto regarded
with a cold though not an incurious eye: intemperance had never lured
him to a momentary self-abandonment. Even the innocent relaxations with
which the austerest minds relieve their accustomed toils, had had no
power to draw him from his beloved researches. The delight monstrari
digito; the gratification of triumphant wisdom; the whispers of an
elevated vanity; existed not for his self-dependent and solitary heart.
He was one of those earnest and high-wrought enthusiasts who now are
almost extinct upon earth, and whom Romance has not hitherto attempted
to pourtray; men not uncommon in the last century, who were devoted to
knowledge, yet disdainful of its fame; who lived for nothing else than
to learn. From store to store, from treasure to treasure, they proceeded
in exulting labour, and having accumulated all, they bestowed nought;
they were the arch-misers of the wealth of letters. Wrapped in
obscurity, in some sheltered nook, remote from the great stir of men,
they passed a life at once unprofitable and glorious; the least part of
what they ransacked would appal the industry of a modern student, yet
the most superficial of modern students might effect more for mankind.
They lived among oracles, but they gave none forth. And yet, even in
this very barrenness, there seems something high; it was a rare and
great spectacle--Men, living aloof from the roar and strife of the
passions that raged below, devoting themselves to the knowledge which is
our purification and our immortality on earth, and yet deaf and blind
to the allurements of the vanity which generally accompanies research;
refusing the ignorant homage of their kind, making their sublime motive
their only meed, adoring Wisdom for her sole sake, and set apart in the
populous universe, like stars, luminous with their own light, but too
remote from the earth on which they looked, to shed over its inmates the
lustre with which they glowed.
From his youth to the present period, Aram had dwelt little in cities
though he had visited many, yet he could scarcely be called ignorant of
mankind; there seems something intuitive in the science which teaches
us the knowledge of our race. Some men emerge from their seclusion, and
find, all at once, a power to dart into the minds and drag forth the
motives of those they see; it is a sort of second sight, born with
them, not acquired. And Aram, it may be, rendered yet more acute by his
profound and habitual investigations of our metaphysical frame, never
quitted his solitude to mix with others, without penetrating into the
broad traits or prevalent infirmities their characters possessed.
In this, indeed, he differed from the scholar tribe, and even in
abstraction was mechanically vigilant and observant. Much in his nature
would, had early circumstances given it a different bias, have fitted
him for worldly superiority and command. A resistless energy, an
unbroken perseverance, a profound and scheming and subtle thought, a
genius fertile in resources, a tongue clothed with eloquence, all, had
his ambition so chosen, might have given him the same empire over the
physical, that he had now attained over the intellectual world. It could
not be said that Aram wanted benevolence, but it was dashed, and mixed
with a certain scorn: the benevolence was the offspring of his nature;
the scorn seemed the result of his pursuits. He would feed the birds
from his window, he would tread aside to avoid the worm on his path;
were one of his own tribe in danger, he would save him at the hazard of
his life:--yet in his heart he despised men, and believed them beyond
amelioration. Unlike the present race of schoolmen, who incline to the
consoling hope of human perfectibility, he saw in the gloomy past but a
dark prophecy of the future. As Napoleon wept over one wounded soldier
in the field of battle, yet ordered without emotion, thousands to a
certain death; so Aram would have sacrificed himself for an individual,
but would not have sacrificed a momentary gratification for his race.
And this sentiment towards men, at once of high disdain and profound
despondency, was perhaps the cause why he rioted in indolence upon his
extraordinary mental wealth, and could not be persuaded either to dazzle
the world or to serve it. But by little and little his fame had broke
forth from the limits with which he would have walled it: a man who had
taught himself, under singular difficulties, nearly all the languages
of the civilized earth; the profound mathematician, the elaborate
antiquarian, the abstruse philologist, uniting with his graver lore the
more florid accomplishments of science, from the scholastic trifling
of heraldry to the gentle learning of herbs and flowers, could scarcely
hope for utter obscurity in that day when all intellectual acquirement
was held in high honour, and its possessors were drawn together into a
sort of brotherhood by the fellowship of their pursuits. And though
Aram gave little or nothing to the world himself, he was ever willing
to communicate to others any benefit or honour derivable from his
researches. On the altar of science he kindled no light, but the
fragrant oil in the lamps of his more pious brethren was largely
borrowed from his stores. From almost every college in Europe came to
his obscure abode letters of acknowledgement or inquiry; and few
foreign cultivators of learning visited this country without seeking
an interview with Aram. He received them with all the modesty and the
courtesy that characterized his demeanour; but it was noticeable that
he never allowed these interruptions to be more than temporary. He
proffered no hospitality, and shrunk back from all offers of friendship;
the interview lasted its hour, and was seldom renewed. Patronage was
not less distasteful to him than sociality. Some occasional visits and
condescensions of the great, he had received with a stern haughtiness,
rather than his wonted and subdued urbanity. The precise amount of his
fortune was not known; his wants were so few, that what would have been
poverty to others might easily have been competence to him; and the only
evidence he manifested of the command of money, was in his extended and
various library.
He had now been about two years settled in his present retreat. Unsocial
as he was, every one in the neighbourhood loved him; even the reserve
of a man so eminent, arising as it was supposed to do from a painful
modesty, had in it something winning; and he had been known to evince on
great occasions, a charity and a courage in the service of others which
removed from the seclusion of his habits the semblance of misanthropy
and of avarice. The peasant drew aside with a kindness mingled with his
respect, as in his homeward walk he encountered the pale and thoughtful
Student, with the folded arms and downeast eyes, which characterised the
abstraction of his mood; and the village maiden, as she curtsied by him,
stole a glance at his handsome but melancholy countenance; and told her
sweetheart she was certain the poor scholar had been crossed in love.
And thus passed the Student’s life; perhaps its monotony and dullness
required less compassion than they received; no man can judge of the
happiness of another. As the Moon plays upon the waves, and seems to our
eyes to favour with a peculiar beam one long track amidst the waters,
leaving the rest in comparative obscurity; yet all the while, she is no
niggard in her lustre--for though the rays that meet not our eyes seem
to us as though they were not, yet she with an equal and unfavouring
loveliness, mirrors herself on every wave: even so, perhaps, Happiness
falls with the same brightness and power over the whole expanse of Life,
though to our limited eyes she seems only to rest on those billows from
which the ray is reflected back upon our sight.
From his contemplations, of whatsoever nature, Aram was now aroused by a
loud summons at the door;--the clock had gone eleven. Who could at
that late hour, when the whole village was buried in sleep, demand
admittance? He recollected that Madeline had said the Stranger who had
so alarmed them had inquired for him, at that recollection his cheek
suddenly blanched, but again, that stranger was surely only some poor
traveller who had heard of his wonted charity, and had called to solicit
relief, for he had not met the Stranger on the road to Lester’s house;
and he had naturally set down the apprehensions of his fair visitants to
a mere female timidity. Who could this be? no humble wayfarer would at
that hour crave assistance;--some disaster perhaps in the village. From
his lofty chamber he looked forth and saw the stars watch quietly over
the scattered cottages and the dark foliage that slept breathlessly
around. All was still as death, but it seemed the stillness of innocence
and security: again! the bell again! He thought he heard his name
shouted without; he strode once or twice irresolutely to and fro the
chamber; and then his step grew firm, and his native courage returned.
His pistols were still girded round him; he looked to the priming, and
muttered some incoherent words; he then descended the stairs, and slowly
unbarred the door. Without the porch, the moonlight full upon his harsh
features and sturdy frame, stood the ill-omened Traveller.