II.
SIXTEEN YEARS AFTER.
Esmond took horses to Castlewood. He had not seen its ancient gray towers and well-remembered woods for nearly fourteen years, and since he rode thence with my lord, to whom his mistress with her young children by her side waved an adieu. What ages seemed to have passed since then; what years of action and passion, of care, love, hope, disaster! The children were grown up now and had stories of their own. As for Esmond, he felt to be a hundred years old; his dear mistress only seemed unchanged; she looked and welcomed him quite as of old. There was the fountain in the court babbling its familiar music, the old hall and its furniture, the carved chair my late lord used, the very flagon he drank from.
Esmond’s mistress knew he would like to sleep in the little room he used to occupy; ’twas made ready for him, and wallflowers and sweet herbs set in the adjoining chamber, the chaplain’s room.
In tears of not unmanly emotion, with prayers of submission to the awful Dispenser of death and life, of good and evil fortune, Mr. Esmond passed a part of that first night at Castlewood; lying awake for many hours as the clock kept tolling (in tones so well remembered); looking back, as all men will that revisit their home of childhood, over the great gulf of time, and surveying himself on the distant bank yonder, a sad little melancholy boy with his lord still alive,—his dear mistress, a girl yet, her children sporting around her.
Years ago, a boy on that very bed, when she had blessed him and called him her knight, he had made a vow to be faithful and never desert her dear service. Had he kept that fond boyish promise? Yes, before Heaven; yes, praise be to God! His life had been hers; his blood, his fortune, his name, his whole heart ever since had been hers and her children’s. All night long he was dreaming his boyhood over again and waking fitfully; he half fancied he heard Father Holt calling to him from the next chamber, and that he was coming in and out from the mysterious window.
Esmond rose up before the dawn, passed into the next room, where the air was heavy with the odor of the wallflowers, looked into the brazier where the papers had been burnt, into the old presses where Holt’s books and papers had been kept, and tried the spring and whether the window worked still. The spring had not been touched for years, but yielded at length, and the whole fabric of the window sank down. He lifted it and it relapsed into its frame; no one had ever passed thence since Holt used it sixteen years ago.
Esmond remembered his poor lord saying, on the last day of his life, that Holt used to come in and out of the house like a ghost, and knew that the father liked these mysteries, and practised such secret disguises, entrances, and exits; this was the way the ghost came and went, his pupil had always conjectured. Esmond closed the casement up again as the dawn was rising over Castlewood village; he could hear the clinking at the blacksmith’s forge yonder among the trees, across the green, and past the river, on which a mist still lay sleeping.
Next Esmond opened that long cupboard over the woodwork of the mantelpiece, big enough to hold a man, and in which Mr. Holt used to keep sundry secret properties of his. The two swords he remembered so well as a boy lay actually there still, and Esmond took them out and wiped them with a strange curiosity of emotion. There were a bundle of papers here too, which no doubt had been left at Holt’s last visit to the place, in my Lord Viscount’s life, that very day when the priest had been arrested and taken to Hexham Castle. Esmond made free with these papers, and found treasonable matter of King William’s reign, and a letter from the king at St. Germains offering to confer upon his trusty and well-beloved Francis Viscount Castlewood the titles of Earl and Marquis of Esmond, bestowed by patent royal, and in the fourth year of his reign, upon Thomas Viscount Castlewood and the heirs-male of his body, in default of which issue the ranks and dignities were to pass to Francis aforesaid.
This was the paper whereof my lord had spoken, which Holt showed him the very day he was arrested, and for an answer to which he would come back in a week’s time. I put these papers hastily into the crypt whence I had taken them, being interrupted by a tapping of a light finger at the ring of the chamber door; ’twas my kind mistress, with her face full of love and welcome. She, too, had passed the night wakefully no doubt, but neither asked the other how the hours had been spent. There are things we divine without speaking, and know though they happen out of our sight. This fond lady hath told me that she knew both days when I was wounded abroad. Who shall say how far sympathy reaches, and how truly love can prophesy? “I looked into your room,” was all she said; “the bed was vacant, the little old bed! I knew I should find you here.” And tender and blushing faintly with a benediction in her eyes, the gentle creature kissed him.
They walked out hand in hand through the old court and to the terrace walk, where the grass was glistening with dew, and the birds in the green woods above were singing their delicious choruses under the blushing morning sky. How well all things were remembered! The ancient towers and gables of the hall darkling against the east, the purple shadows on the green slopes, the quaint devices and carvings of the dial, the forest-crowned heights, the fair yellow plain cheerful with crops and corn, the shining river rolling through it toward the pearly hills beyond; all these were before us, along with a thousand beautiful memories of our youth, beautiful and sad, but as real and vivid in our minds as that fair and always-remembered scene our eyes beheld once more. We forget nothing. The memory sleeps but wakens again; I often think how it shall be, when, after the last sleep of death, the réveillé shall arouse us forever, and the past in one flash of self-consciousness rush back, like the soul, revivified.
A GOOD DAUGHTER.
JOHN GORHAM PALFREY.
John Gorham Palfrey was born at Boston in 1796. His ancestors were prominent in the Revolution, and he came of a brave and godly race.
He graduated from Harvard in 1815, and three years later accepted the pastorate of a Unitarian church in Boston. He became engaged in literary work and leaving the ministry took a professorship at Harvard. He held this position for eight years, from 1831 to 1839.
In 1836 he became editor of the “North American Review” and held this position until 1843.
He became interested in politics and was elected a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, and later, Secretary of State. His best literary work was the “History of New England.”
He died at Cambridge in 1881.
A good daughter!—there are other ministries of love, more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart’s warm requitals more joyfully respond. There is no such thing as a comparative estimate of a parent’s affection for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given.
But a son’s occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad; and he lives more among temptations, which hardly permit the affection that is following him, perhaps over half the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father’s roof for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent’s house.
Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside. She is his morning sunlight and his evening star. The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit. The lessons of recorded wisdom, which he reads with her eyes, come to his mind with a new charm, as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice.
He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile. She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered, because they are unpretending but all-expressive proofs of love.
And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener of a mother’s cares! What an ever-present delight and triumph to a mother’s affection! Oh, how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent’s eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent’s heart!
A true love will, almost certainly, always greet their approaching steps. That they will hardly alienate. But their ambition should be, not to have it a love merely which feelings implanted by nature excite, but one made intense and overflowing by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness do not call forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion.
THE SPIRIT OF THE AIR.
[Abridged.]
JOHN RUSKIN.
The orders of animals are the serpent and the bird: the serpent, in which the breath or spirit is less than in any other creature, and the earth-power greatest; the bird, in which the breath or spirit is more full than in any other creature, and the earth-power least.
We will take the bird first. It is little more than a drift of the air brought into form by plumes; the air is in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh, and glows with air in its flying, like blown flame; it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it,—is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.
Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air. All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit together in its song. As we may imagine the wild form of the cloud closed into the perfect form of the bird’s wings, so the wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice; unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all intense passion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among the boughs and hedges through heat of day, like little winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of the wild rose.
Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put the colors of the air; on these the gold of the cloud, that cannot be gathered by any covetousness; the rubies of the clouds; the vermilion of the cloud-bar, and the flame of the cloud-crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted blue of the deep wells of the sky,—all these, seized by the creating spirit, and woven into films and threads of plume; with wave on wave following and fading along breast, and throat, and opened wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the sea-sand; even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between the stronger plumes,—seen, but too soft for touch.
And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form; and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help, descending, as the Fire, to speak, but as the Dove, to bless....
The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters into union with the earth at its surface, and with its waters, so as to be the apparent cause of their ascending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, at once, staying the heat of the sun’s rays in its own body, but warding their force with its clouds. It warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and frost; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of Libyan rock.
It gives its own strength to the sea; forms and fills every cell of its foam; sustains the precipices, and designs the valleys of its waves; gives the gleam to their moving under the night, and the white fire to their plains under sunrise; lifts their voices along the rocks, bears above them the spray of birds, pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow of its hand: dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, and their glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, for sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the cloud; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks; divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, calls them to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds from them the brooks that cease not, and strews with them the dews that cease.
It spins and weaves their fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews; and flits and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that traverses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like life.
It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which can be moulded flesh; it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of adamant, and becomes the green leaf out of the dry ground; enters into the separated shapes of the earth it has tempered, commands the ebb and flow of the current of their life, fills their limbs with its own lightness, measures their existence by its indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the words by which one soul can be known to another; is to them the hearing of the ear, and the beating of the heart; and, passing away, leaves them to the peace that hears and moves no more.
From “Athena, Queen of the Air.”
THANATOPSIS.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
For an account of Bryant’s life see Book IV.
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air,—
Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone—nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,
The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulcher. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, and pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there;
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone;
So shalt thou rest—and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-head man,—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
JOAN OF ARC.
[Abridged.]
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
Thomas De Quincey was the son of a prosperous merchant in England. He was born at Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785, but spent his childhood in a country house near the town.
He was a shy, dreamy boy, and his later writings record many impressions which he received in these early years. His father died when he was about seven years old, and his mother, a stately lady with fine intellect, cared for her little ones at their country home, doing her best for their education.
De Quincey learned to read and write while he was a very little child, but his first schooling was given him by one of his guardians, who was curate in Salford, two miles from De Quincey’s home.
After the father’s death William De Quincey, a boy of twelve, returned from boarding school. He was five years older than Thomas, boisterous, frank, and clever, and led his younger brother a hard life. William waged war with the factory boys on his way to and from school, and poor little Thomas was forced to join in their battles. The hours of reverie and poetical thought were interrupted, for William took possession of him like a whirlwind.
Four years later the old home was sold, De Quincey’s mother went to live at Bath, and Thomas entered the grammar school of the town, where he remained for two years.
He was very popular among the teachers because of his aptness as a Latin scholar.
He was next sent to a private school, where he was a favorite because of his kind and friendly disposition and his willingness to help any of the boys with their Latin or Greek. He was a leader in their games, but showed his literary turn of mind in mimic fights between the Greeks and Trojans.
He had become acquainted with young Lord Westport, who invited him to travel with him about England and Ireland. While with Lord Westport he met King George III., who chatted with him, asking if he was of French descent. Thomas proudly assured his majesty that the English De Quinceys dated back to the Conquest. He met the king several times at fêtes to which he was invited with Lord Westport.
On his return home, De Quincey desired to attend the grammar school at Bath. He did not care for the private school, for there was no one there with whom he could contend. It was decided, however, that he should attend the grammar school at Manchester, where he studied for a year and a half, and then, after appealing in vain to his guardians, ran away.
He first intended to wander among the English Lakes. He had read some of Wordsworth’s poems and longed to meet the poet, but, recognizing that a runaway would hardly be looked upon with favor, returned to his home.
Here he found an uncle who furnished him with funds and gave him permission to travel about for a season and enjoy his liberty.
De Quincey traveled about North Wales from July until the late fall of 1802, and then went to London. Here he lived a wretched life,—his money gone,—and he was dependent on charity, living from hand to mouth.
He was finally discovered and reclaimed by some friends and went back to Chester, where his mother resided.
In the autumn of 1803 he accepted an offer made by his guardians and entered Worcester College, Oxford. Little is known of De Quincey’s life at college beyond the fact that he spent much of his time in quiet reading and study.
It was during these days as a student that De Quincey began to take opium,—first as a release from pain and later for its effect as a stimulant.
In 1807 lie made the acquaintance of Coleridge, whom he regarded with the love of a son. This friendship led to an introduction to Wordsworth. Two years later he took up his abode at the Lakes, in the pretty cottage at Grasmere, where Wordsworth had been living, and this was his home for more than twenty years.
Coleridge, Southey, and John Wilson (“Christopher North”) had their homes in this region, and De Quincey spent many hours in walks and talks with his friends.
For seven years De Quincey lived alone in his pretty cottage and then married a lovely young girl named Margaret Simpson.
The habit of opium taking had almost mastered him, so that he lost ambition and capacity for work. Three years after his marriage he determined to break off this terrible habit. His family were in need, and he must support them.
He was offered the position of editor of a Westmoreland newspaper. He aroused from his life of indulgence and opium dreams and became connected with the magazines.
His connection with Blackwood drew him to Edinburgh, where he was often a guest at the home of his old friend “Christopher North.” He became acquainted here with Carlyle.
At length, in 1830, he took his family to Edinburgh, which was his home until his death in December of 1859.
Joanna, as we in England should call her, but, according to her own statement, Jeanne D’Arc, was born at Domremy, a village on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne. Here lay two roads, not so much for travelers that were few, as for armies that were too many by half.
The situation of Joanna was full of profound suggestions to a heart that listened for the stealthy steps of change and fear that too surely were in motion. But, if the place were grand, the time, the burden of the time, was far more so. The air overhead in its upper chambers was hurtling with the obscure sound; was dark with sullen fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred and thirty years.
It was not wonderful that in such a haunted solitude, with such a haunted heart, Joanna should see angelic visions and hear angelic voices. These voices whispered to her forever the duty, self-imposed, of delivering France. Five years she listened to these monitory voices with internal struggles. At length she could resist no longer. Doubt gave way, and she left her home forever in order to present herself at the dauphin’s court.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests, and hills, and fountains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and consecrated oratories. This peasant girl was self-educated through her own meditativeness. If the reader turns to that divine passage in “Paradise Regained,” which Milton has put into the mouth of Christ when first entering the wilderness,—
Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once
Awakened in me swarm, while I consider
What from within I feel myself, and hear
What from without comes often to my ears,
Ill sorting with my present state compared!
When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do
What might be public good; myself I thought
Born to that end—
he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings were budding that should carry her from Orleans to Rheims; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing itself that should carry her from the kingdom of France Delivered to the eternal kingdom.
When Joanna appeared, the dauphin had been on the point of giving up the struggle with the English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the south of France. She taught him to blush for such abject counsels. She liberated Orleans, that great city, so decisive by its fate for the issue of the war. Entering the city after sunset, on the 29th of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8, for the entire disappearance of the besieging force.
On the 29th of June, she fought and gained over the English the decisive battle of Patay; on the 9th of July, she took Troyes by a coup-de-main from a mixed garrison of English and Burgundians; on the 15th of that month, she carried the dauphin into Rheims; on Sunday, the 17th, she crowned him; and there she rested from her labor of triumph. All that was to be done she had now accomplished; what remained was—to suffer.
But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought wonders so great for France, was she not elated? Did she not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety of mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success so giddy? Let her enemies declare. During the progress of her movement, and in the center of ferocious struggles, she had manifested the temper of her feelings, by the pity which she had everywhere expressed for the suffering enemy.
She forwarded to the English leaders a touching invitation to unite with the French, as brothers in a common crusade against infidels, thus opening the road for a soldierly retreat. She interposed to protect the captive or the wounded—she threw herself off her horse to kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his situation allowed. She sheltered the English, that invoked her aid, in her own quarters.
On the day when she had finished her work, she wept; for she knew that, when her triumphal task was done, her end must be approaching. Her aspirations pointed only to a place, which seemed to her more than usually full of natural piety, as one in which it would give her pleasure to die. And she uttered, between smiles and tears, as a wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, a broken prayer that God would return her to the solitudes from which he had drawn her, and suffer her to become a shepherdess once more.
It was a half fantastic prayer, because, from childhood upwards, visions that she had no power to mistrust, and the voices which sounded in her ear forever, had long since persuaded her mind that for her no such prayer could be granted.
All went wrong from this time. More than one military plan was entered upon which she did not approve. At length she was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally surrendered to the English.
Now came her trial. Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defense, and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God’s lightning, and true as God’s lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!
On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before midday, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air currents.
What else, I demand, than mere weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke the vast line of battle then arrayed against her? What else but her meek, saintly demeanor won, from the enemies that till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration? What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier—who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold, as his tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow—suddenly to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood?
What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy! And if this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers.
Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave her to God.
The shepherd girl that had delivered France—she, from her dungeon, she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her last dream—saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter festival, which man had denied to her languishing heart—that resurrection of springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests—were by God given back into her hands, as jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers.
By special privilege, for her might be created, in this farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This mission had now been fulfilled.
The hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had been suffered, had been survived. And in her last fight upon the scaffold she had triumphed gloriously; victoriously she had tasted the stings of death. For all, except this comfort from her farewell dream, she had died—died, amidst the tears of ten thousand enemies—died, amidst the drums and trumpets of armies—died amidst peals redoubling upon peals, volleys upon volleys, from the saluting clarions of martyrs.
From “Biographies.”
GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION.
A key to the symbols most of which are used in this Reader to indicate the pronunciation of the more difficult words.