I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister’s spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
For Iris had no mother to infold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister’s shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
She had not learned the mystery of awaking
Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow’s aching,
Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
Yet lived, wrought, suffered. Lo, the pictured token!
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,——
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,——
Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
Save me! O, save me! Shall I die forgiven?
And then——Ah, God! But nay, it little matters:
Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
If she had——Well! She longed, and knew not wherefore
Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
No second self to say her evening prayer for?
She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
Vain? Let it be so! Nature was her teacher.
What if a lonely and unsistered creature
Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
Saying, unsaddened,——This shall soon be faded,
And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
——This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
Somewhere, beneath some maiden’s tear-dimmed glances
May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
Sweet sister! Iris, who shall never name thee,
Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
Spare her, I pray thee! If the maid is sleeping,
Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
No more! She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume. As
I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment. Is it quite fair to take
advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of
a young girl’s nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers
tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent
waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might
strive to pierce in vain? Why has the child trusted _me_ with such
artless confessions,——self-revelations, which might be whispered by
trembling lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but
which I cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging
a sacred confidence?
To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought. She
did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was too
profoundly innocent. Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes
that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness. Having
nobody to tell her story to,——having, as she said in her verses, no
musical instrument to laugh and cry with her,——nothing, in short, but
the language of pen and pencil,——all the veinings of her nature were
impressed on these pages, as those of a fresh leaf are transferred to the
blank sheets which enclose it. It was the same thing which I remember
seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had one
day at our boarding-house. This child was a deaf-mute. But its soul had
the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which
through natural organs realizes itself in words. Only it had to talk
with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its face, I
have never seen in any other human countenance.
I found the soul of Iris in the book that lay open before me. Sometimes
it was a poem that held it, sometimes a drawing,——angel, arabesque,
caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make
nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I remember, with a streak of
red zigzagging out of it across the paper as naturally as a crack
runs through a china bowl. On the next page a dead bird,——some little
favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I
saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had
a letter sealed,——a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries. It
was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those homelier
wild-flowers which we call _weeds_,——for it seemed there was none of them
too humble for her to love, and none too little cared for by Nature to
be without its beauty for her artist eye and pencil. By the side of the
garden-flowers,——of Spring’s curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds,
dear to sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories,——nay,
oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush that
rendered them,——were those common growths which fling themselves to be
crushed under our feet and our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this
perpetual martyrdom that we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine
beauty.
Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,——just as we see
them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling
sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to
the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes,
with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the
tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one after
another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of
decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out;
the red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,——“the
white man’s foot,” as the Indians called it,——the wiry, jointed stems of
that iron creeping plant which we call “knot-_grass_,” and which loves
its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a
hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;——all these plants, and
many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.——On one of
the pages were some musical notes. I touched them from curiosity on a
piano belonging to one of our boarders. Strange! There are passages that
I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they
were gasping for words to interpret them. She must have heard the strains
that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor’s chamber. The
illuminated border she had traced round the page that held these notes
took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for. Above, a long
monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded and sullen,
if you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side an Alpine
_needle_, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the other
a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had
a strange look,——one would say the cliff was bleeding;——perhaps she did
not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with
his wings spread over some unseen object.——And on the very next page
a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
of Fuller’s “Holy War,” in which I recognized without difficulty
every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
caricature,——three only excepted,——the Little Gentleman, myself, and one
other.
I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
girl’s little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.——There
is a left arm again, though;——no,——that is from the “Fighting
Gladiator,”——the “_Jeune Héros combattant_” of the Louvre;——there is
the broad ring of the shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate
casts of the “Gladiator’s” arm look immense; but in its place the limb
looks light, almost slender,——such is the perfection of that miraculous
marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until
I looked on that statue.]——Here is something very odd, to be sure. An
Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in
her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give
them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying
under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,——spray of the dry
ocean sailed by the “ship of the desert.” A herd of buffaloes, uncouth,
shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The
buffalo is the _lion_ of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse,
with his huge, rough collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of
the other beast. And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with
answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake’s blood under
their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons, standing on one
foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare
of monumental effigies.——A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it
without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at.
You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is
trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to
look at in the light of one of Nature’s eccentric curves, belonging to
her system of beauty, as the hyperbola and parabola belong to the conic
sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures,
like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this
paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected
with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.——That is nothing
to another transcendental fancy of mine. I believe her soul thinks itself
in his little crooked body at times,——if it does not really get freed
or half freed from her own. Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? You
know what I mean,——transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and
limbs taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to
a lay-figure. She had been talking with him and listening to him one day
when the boarders moved from the table nearly all at once. But she sat
as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and
still. I went to her,——she was breathing as usual, and her heart was
beating naturally enough,——but she did not answer. I bent her arm; it
was as plastic as softened wax, and kept the place I gave it.——This will
never do, though,——and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead.
She started and looked round.——I have been in a dream,——she said;——I feel
as if all my strength were in this arm;——give me your hand!——She took my
right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough, but——Good
Heaven! I believe she will crack my bones! All the nervous power in her
body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps
her iron window-bars,——she who could hardly glove herself when in her
common health. Iris turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;——she
saw she had given pain. Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for
me;——the poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to
the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.
To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other
which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the
left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a
single bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to
be soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons
such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must
have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got
his nightmare vision, described by another as “cemeteries of departed
greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining
their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and
mutilated inscriptions.” Such a black dungeon faced the page that held
the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was
coiled,——what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not
make out.
I told you the young girl’s soul was in this book. As I turned over the
last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces
among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran
round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or
manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed
to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar
to me; there were features that did not seem new.——Can it be so? Was
there ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her
heart’s secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need
of being questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in
scores from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them
accomplished and virtuous,——in case anybody should question the fact. I
began to understand her;——and what is so charming as to read the secret
of a real _femme incomprise_?——for such there are, though they are not
the ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
I found these stanzas in the book, among many others. I give them as
characterizing the tone of her sadder moments: