LIST OF ETCHINGS.

1.	Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.
2.	Out of my garden.
3.	Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Benedetto
4.	La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.
5.	La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von Schwind.
6.	Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.
7.	Eve and Cain. After Steinle.
8.	Study. After an old print.
9.	The Parcæ. From a sketch by Carstens.
10.	Antique Owlet. In Goethe’s collection at Weimar.

^_^*	The woodcuts are inserted to divide the paragraphs and subjects, and are ornamental rather than illustrative. Where the same vignette heads several paragraphs consecutively, it is to signify that the ideas expressed stand in relation to each other.

PART I.

Ethics and Character.

Ethical Fragments.

1.

Bacon says, how wisely! that “there is often as great vanity in withdrawing and retiring men’s conceits from the world, as in obtruding them.” Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty. When I see people haunted by the idea of self,—spreading their hands before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled with looking glass,—always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled modesty,—always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,—when I see all this, as I have seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,—they do well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to others, fame is “love disguised,” the love that answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,—if not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if those who can bring nothing or will bring nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon, call out “VANITY!”

2.

There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes again a vital truth.

3.

It It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article, or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.

Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)

Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Ruskin’s last volume of “The Stones of Venice” (the Sea Stories). As I do not always subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.

“We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:—divided into mere segments of men,—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points are polished—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men,—we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one way,—not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show them their misery; and to preach to them—if we do nothing more than preach,—is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour.” ...

“We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative; whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”

Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:

“Our life is turn’d Out of her course wherever man is made An offering or a sacrifice,—a tool Or implement,—a passive thing employed As a brute mean, without acknowledgment Of common right or interest in the end, Used or abused as selfishness may prompt. Say what can follow for a rational soul Perverted thus, but weakness in all good And strength in evil?”

And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin calls the thinking, classes of the community.

It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.

4.

We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word “soul.” She interrupted to ask, “What is soul?”

“That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,——”

“And aches?” she added eagerly.

5.

I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell’s Life of Johnson that “it is a theory which every one knows to be false in fact, that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery.” I should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not false but true: that virtue does produce happiness, and vice does produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By happiness, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity. By virtue, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.

And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with the absence of the benevolent propensities,—these constitute misery as a state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had 12,000l. a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends; very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreasonable exigéance with regard to things, without any high standard with regard to persons,—these made the misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.

I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this philosophy of happiness, “the philosophy of the frying-pan.” But this was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes, something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure—is as sublime a thing as virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them.

6.

Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God’s blessed sunshine—Tristi fummo nel’ aer dolce; and in some of the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.

Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and goodness to consist in “a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfaction.”

What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of Christ in Raphael’s Transfiguration should rather be our ideal of Him who came “to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

7.

A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially true of C——: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that “the wisdom that is from above is gentle.” He is a man who carries his bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark, because perversely he will not throw the light of his mind upon them.

8.

Wilhelm von humboldt says, “Old letters lose their vitality.”

Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so dangerous to keep some letters,—so wicked to burn others.

9.

A man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once, or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,—is indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference? Is not truth as dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes this distinction,—one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?

10.

It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up his arms while he prayed.

“Ce qui est moins que moi m’éteint et m’assomme; ce qui est à côté de moi m’ennuie et me fatigue. II n’y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui me soutienne et m’arrache à moi-même.”

11.

There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so that men’s hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live not in the heart of the writer,—only in his head.

And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,—who are never weary of holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.

Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar with evil?

12.

“Thought and theory,” said Wordsworth, “must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

Yes, and no. What we act has its consequences on earth. What we think, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old rhymester hath it:

“He that good thinketh good may do, And God will help him there unto; For was never good work wrought, Without beginning of good thought.”

The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the most expedient.

On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed the first impulse, O. G. said, “In good minds the first impulses are generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the negative,—it is the vulgar side of every thing.”

On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse to do good here becomes injury there, and we are forced to calculate results; we cannot trust to them.

I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient must ensue, and I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one’s conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some cases to overcome evil. But it requires more—it needs bravery and self-reliance and surpassing faith—to act out the true inspirations of your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.

Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry,—or, it may be, religion.

F—— used the phrase “stung into heroism” as Shelley said, “cradled into poetry,” by wrong.

13.

Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, “a mere fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the Evangelists.” And he says, that “the existence of a personal, intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. ‘Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?’—Amos, iii. 6. ‘I make peace and create evil.’—Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery of the abyss of God.”

Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian, Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.

14.

“We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and rights,—with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of men.”

“The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole human race.”—Thom’s Discourses on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians.

And this is the true Catholic spirit,—the spirit and the teaching of Paul,—in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,—the spirit and tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality within a creed, or use it to a purpose.

15.

Dr. Baillie once said that “all his observation of death-beds inclined him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world as unconscious as we came into it.” “In all my experience,” he added, “I have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary.”

Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of “one instance in fifty to the contrary” would invalidate the assumption that such was the law of nature (or “nature’s intention,” which, if it means any thing, means the same).

The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.

16. Thoughts on a Sermon.

He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in “the religion of pain,” and “the deification of sorrow!” But is he therefore right? What has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the earnestness of conviction? that “pain is the life of God as shown forth in Christ;”—“that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to us.” This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is this the law under which we are to live and strive? The missionary Bridaine accused himself of sin in that he had preached fasting, penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped in poverty and dying of hunger; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, when they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to those whose hearts are aching from moral evil?

Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will believe in the existence of what I do not see—that God is benign, that nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance. While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of the unfailing dawn,—even though my soul be amazed into such a blind perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask “where is the East? and whence the dayspring?” For the East holds its wonted place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.

God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am ready—I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I must; but I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on another.

17.

If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings, only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with fear; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me. Take away my love, and you take away my fear: take away their love, and you take away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the sources of life and feeling.

18.

Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes.

19.

While we were discussing Balzac’s celebrity as a romance writer, she (O. G.) said, with a shudder: “His laurels are steeped in the tears of women,—every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman’s heart.”

20.

Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to regard it as a terrible misfortune that the whole burgher class in Scotland should be gradually preparing for representative reform. “I mean,” he says, “the middle and respectable classes: when a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland from the towns.” “The gentry,” he adds, “will abide longer by sound principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves, and appointments for their sons and so on. But this is a very hollow dependence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing old,” &c. &c.

With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind. The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide,—over the decay of which he laments,—are such as can only be upheld by the most vulgar self-interest! If a man should utter openly such sentiments in these days, what should we think of him?

In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction. In the unrest of freedom the spirit of change and progress.

21.

“A single life,” said Bacon, “doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.”

Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.

Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their own relatives: “Their habits, their manners, their talk, their acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their professional obligations point out another.” If this were true universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one element, and not the least, of their power.

22.

Landor says truly: “Love is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater.”

“Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be preserved.”

Again:—“Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand on high for an example.”

“Weak motives,” he says, “are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is—to bring a metaphor from the forest—more top than root.”

Here is another sentence from the same writer—rich in wise sayings:—

“Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth. There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed that there may be no bad example! How many exertions made to recommend and inculcate a good one.”

True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. “Pour être assez bon il faut l’être trop:” we all need more mercy than we deserve.

How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!

23.

A.—— observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, “that the peace and comfort which they had sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where there is disease and unrest, not otherwise.”

24.

“A poet,” says Coleridge, “ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than your memory.”

This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense, great borrowers.

25.

“What is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do not yield to temptation and the bad do.”

This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between being good and being bad.

26.

The Italians say (in one of their characteristic proverbs) Sospetto licenzia Fede. Lord Bacon interprets the saying “as if suspicion did give a passport to faith,” which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous. It means, that suspicion discharges us from the duty of good faith; and in this, its original sense, it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs, worldly wise and profoundly immoral.

27.

It was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that “speech was like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs” (i. e. rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind when he wrote those beautiful lines:

“Speech is the light, the morning of the mind; It spreads the beauteous images abroad, Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul.”

Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a vivid poetical image.

28.

“Those are the killing griefs that do not speak,” is true of some, not all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds utterance while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, “as the beast crieth, expansive not appealing.” That is my own nature: so in grief or in joy, I say as the birds sing:

“Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt, Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!”

29.

Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world!—yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world!

30.

Everything that ever has been, from the beginning of the world till now, belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future, and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of all are in the past; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future.

When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, “I am a part of all that I have seen,” it ought to be rather the converse,—“What I have seen becomes a part of me.”

31.

In what regards policy—government—the interest of the many is sacrificed to the few; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of individuals are sacrificed to the many.

32.

We spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide: O. G. agreed as to this instance, but added: “There is a different aspect under which suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think, from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of confidence in God that we quit life. It is as if we should flee to the feet of the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim, ‘O my father! take me home! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no more, so I come to you!’”

Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless face, she said: “His countenance always gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to break (making the gesture with her hand), that I may see the countenance of his heart, for that must be beautiful!”

33.

Carlyle said to me: “I want to see some institution to teach a man the truth, the worth, the beauty, the heroism of which his present existence is capable; where’s the use of sending him to study what the Greeks and Romans did, and said, and wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would have been what they were, if they had just only studied what the Phœnicians did before them?” I should have answered, had I dared: “Yet perhaps the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the Egyptians and Phœnicians had not been before them.”

34.

Can there be progress which is not progression—which does not leave a past from which to start—on which to rest our foot when we spring forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot get on without linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is destructive—all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that which the past built up, what reward have we?—we are forced to fall back, and have to begin anew. “Novelty,” as Lord Bacon says, “cannot be content to add, but it must deface.” For this very reason novelty is not progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their places—let it be sufficient to leave them behind us, measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.

35.

E—— was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and even with mental suffering.

36.

“Renoncez dans votre âme, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes, à vouloir vous connaître au-delà de cette existence passagère qui vous est imposée, et vous redeviendrez agréable à Dieu, utile aux autres hommes, tranquille avec vous-mêmes.”

This does not mean “renounce hope or faith in the future.” No! But renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a continuation of this: to anticipate in that future life, another life, a different life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual identity?

If we pray, “O teach us where and what is peace!” would not the answer be, “In the grave ye shall have it—not before?” Yet is it not strange that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us—and what other life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves—how shall there be peace?

As to the future, my soul, like Cato’s, “shrinks back upon herself and startles at destruction;” but I do not think of my own destruction, rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should cease to be—there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.

Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,—we only fancy we do so.

“I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality but a continuation of life—life which is already our own? We have, then, begun our immortality even now.”

For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by which we make life and immortality two (distinct things), do we make time and eternity two, which like the others are really one and the same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of eternity in which we exist now.—The New Philosophy.

37.

Strength does not consist only in the more or the less. There are different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:—The strength of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.

38.

Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive, it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young. Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.

Then are we to assume, that to do good effectively and wisely is the privilege of age and experience? To be good, through faith in goodness, the privilege of the young.

To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain, and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to be at once good and wise—to understand and to love each other as the angels who look down upon us from heaven.

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.

39.

“Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?” was a question debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness, susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments—from jealousy, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of characters; from remorse, that is, from the sense of a wrong inflicted, in another.

40.

The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of life, poesy; the water of life, faith.

41.

I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook, that they might hear them sound.

42.

A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.

“The secret of peace,” said A. B., “is the resolution of the lesser into the greater;” meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher? But it is true in either sense.

The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.

All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and deified, but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy. No!—though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us—his responsive love.

In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that moment we may date its death: it has become the fetch of the living love.

“Motives,” said Coleridge, “imply weakness, and the reasoning powers imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act from impulse alone.” This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole conceived and represented, and he only.

Again:—“If a man’s conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is fiendish.”

And, he might have added, appetite without passion, bestial. Love in which is neither appetite nor passion is angelic. The union of all is human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.

43.

I don’t mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion; but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with us; principles are superinduced.

There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength, and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life, they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions could only be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,—the old mischievous monkish doctrine.

44.

It is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension—easy to concede where we know ourselves wronged—easy to forgive where vengeance is in our power.

“You and I,” said H. G., yesterday, “are alike in this:—both of us so abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we can find nothing better!”

45.

“The wise only possess ideas—the greater part of mankind are possessed by them. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual.” This paragraph from Coleridge sounds like a truism until we have felt its truth.

46.

“La Volonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se transforme en besoin.”—St. Augustin. Which may be rendered—“out of the unregulated will, springs passion, out of passion gratified, habit; out of habits unresisted, necessity.” This, also, is one of the truths which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them, truisms—and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.

47.

I wish I could realise what you call my “grand idea of being independent of the absent.” I have not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not pain and dread to me;—death itself is terrible only as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine—whose dwelling house is far off;—with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

“La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux;” or, it might rather be said, pour eux; but I think this arises from a want either of faith or faithfulness.

“La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c’est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profanations; les mères ne la connaissent pas!”—And why? Because the most faithful love is the love of the mother for her child.

48.

At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in his nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth,—for us women! What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with him? Even as wits—and I have been in company with both—I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men—the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.

It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men—wits by profession—ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.

49.

“When we would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject,—for his view of it is generally right on this side,—and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case.”—Pascal.

50.

“We should reflect,” says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition, “that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the pavement of heaven.”

Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as accessible. That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only loving—therein lies our hearts’ truest, holiest, safest devotion as contrasted with ambition.

It is the “desire of the moth for the star,” that leads to its burning itself in the candle.

51.

The brow stamped “with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow,” is a strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor’s.

He says truly: “It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly.” And again: “What will not tender women suffer to hide their shame!” What indeed! And again: “Nothing is intolerable that is necessary.” And again: “Nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions.”

There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated as a text and expounded, opening into as many “branches” of consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a fallacy, as it seems to me;—others a deeper, wider, and more awful signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.

52.

The same reasons which rendered Goethe’s “Werther” so popular, so passionately admired at the time it appeared—just after the seven years’ war,—helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the individuality of “Werther,” nor the individuality of “Childe Harold” which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading power,—a part of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy moral excitement. “Werther” and “Childe Harold” will never perish; because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the individuality.

Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, “curdled” a whole world of meaning into the compass of one line:—

“The starry Galileo and his woes.” “The blind old man of Chio’s rocky isle.”

Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines are picturesque. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:—

“Placed far amid the melancholy main.”

In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures, fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such lines picturesque.

53.

I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness—especially in my own sex,—yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not, which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but which is most sympathetic with my own.

54.

C—— told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first became known, and was in great hardship, C—— himself had collected a little sum (about 30l.), and sent it to him through his publishers. Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he had head and hands, he would not accept charity. C—— wrote to him in answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found untouched,—left with a friend to be returned to the donors!

This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel with regard to pecuniary obligation,—my own utter repugnance to it, even from the hands of those I most love,—makes one sad to think of. It gives one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!

Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm Meister:—“Es ist sonderbar welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und Gönnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude empfangen würde.”

55.

“In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man—i. e. poets and artists—may be accounted first in order; the merely scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects—those which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of either science or imagination—will not be disparaged if they are placed last.”

All government, all exercise of power—no matter in what form—which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of God, and shall not stand.

“A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise.”—Westminster Review.

56.

“Those writers who never go further into a subject than is compatible with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may be the lights of this age, but they will not be the lights of another.”

“It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,—a material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell around us spiritually, creating harmony,—sounding through the air like the solemn sweet tone of a bell.”

57.

Women are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual and conventional,—I may say professional. On the other hand, women are inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing comfort or love. “Car les femmes out un instinct céleste pour le malheur.” So, in the first instance, they love from gratitude or faith; in the last, from compassion or hope.

58.

“Men of all countries,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “appear to be more alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be willing to allow.”

And in their worst. The distinction between savage and civilised humanity lies not in the qualities, but the habits.

59.

Coleridge notices “the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things in themselves indifferent,” as a sign of unhealthiness in taste, in feeling, in conscience.

The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French literature of the last century.

60.

“And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or a style of living, and allows the formation of new influences that prove of the first importance during the next years.”—Emerson.

61.

Religion, in its general sense, is properly the comprehension and acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul’s allegiance to it; and Christianity, in its particular sense, is the comprehension and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart’s allegiance to that.

62.

Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals. It is an intellectual form of sensuality, inasmuch as it is the passion for the acquisition, the enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible, selfish pleasure; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise, to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edge of all that is fine and tender within us.

63.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with it the rest of the character.

“Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire?” says the Hindoo proverb.

64.

An elegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze; we may, if we approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold its radiance.

65.

Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks of a language of criticism, in which qualities should be graduated by colours; “as, for instance, purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought; scarlet, vigour of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and equable composition, and so on.”

Blue, then, might express contemplative power? yellow, wit? violet, tenderness? and so on.

66.

I quoted to A. the saying of a sceptical philosopher: “The world is but one enormous WILL, constantly rushing into life.”

“Is that,” she responded quickly, “another new name for God?”

67.

A death-bed repentance has become proverbial for its fruitlessness, and a death-bed forgiveness equally so. They who wait till their own death-bed to make reparation, or till their adversary’s death-bed to grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as well as the religious, failure.

68.

A character endued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow wise only through the experience which reaches us through our sympathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements without increasing our capacity to use them.

Not always those who have the quickest, keenest, perception of character are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in sympathy, observation must be merged in love.

69.

Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the Italians have the same word, Tristezza, for melancholy and for malignity or wickedness. The noun Tristo, “a wretch,” has the double sense of our English word corresponding with the French noun misérable. So Judas Iscariot is called quel tristo. Our word “wretchedness” is not, however, used in the double sense of tristezza.

“On ne considère pas assez les paroles comme des faits:” that was well said!

Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it represents.

If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead consciously; it is like adulterating coin.

“Common people,” said Johnson, “do not accurately adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;”—that is to say, they neither apprehend truly nor speak truly—and in this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the “common people.”

It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration, equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which people say sometimes “words—words—mere words!” is unthinking and unwise. It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the inner life between man and man: “Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole,” said Montaigne.

70.

“We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are surely either bad or mad.”

“Or perhaps only sad?”

There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the healing power of Nature is felt—even as Wordsworth describes it—felt in the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse, sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us, they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary, thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours. Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living voice responsive in every murmuring stream.

This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was—how tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! “And where the dead leaf fell there did it rest;” but so still it was that scarce a single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the water’s edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage. Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my mind, blending softly with the presences around me.

“The little bird now to salute the morn Upon the naked branches sets her foot, The leaves still lying at the mossy root, And there a silly chirruping doth keep, As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep; Praising fair summer that too soon is gone, And sad for winter, too soon coming on!” Drayton.

The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as I had seen it but a few days before,—rolling tumultuously, the dead leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such uncanny things,—but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what God can do for us, and what man can not.—Carolside, November 5th, 1843.

71.

“In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous formulæ, and set them aside at once and for ever.”

72.

Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as inevitably and necessarily opposed?—the one sacrificed to the other, and at the best only a compromise possible?

This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we bound to follow His example?

73.

I marked the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned; and I leave it in his quaint old French.

“C’est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise être agitée, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d’orages, pour éveiller par ce contraste les âmes pies et les ravoir de l’oisiveté et du sommeil ou les avail plongées une si longue tranquillité. Si nous contrepèsons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se sont dévoyés, au gain qui nous vient par nous être remis en haleine, ressuscité notre zêle et nos forces à l’occasion de ce combat, je ne sais si l’utilité ne surmonte point le dommage.”

74.

“They (the friends of Cassius) were divided in opinion,—some holding that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was better than civil war.”

Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven to solve the problem after the manner of Cassius—with the dagger’s point.

“Surely,” said Moore, “it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify the principle of resistance to power with such an odious person as the devil!”

75.

“Where the the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small injustice, men must pursue the things which are just in present, and leave the future to Divine Providence.”

This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life till we are placed in some strait in which it is forced upon us.

76.

A woman’s patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man’s,—more passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with her la patrie is only an enlargement of home. In the same manner, a woman’s idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is only the echo—fainter and more distant—of the voice of love.

77.

“La doute s’introduit dans l’âme qui rêve, la foi descend dans l’âme qui souffre.”

The reverse is equally true,—and judging from my own experience, I should say oftener true.

78.

“La curiosité est si voisine à la perfidie qu’elle peut enlaidir les plus beaux visages.”

79.

When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with emotion, “A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no adequate memorial of its greatness.” Speaking of him afterwards he said, “Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not the productive; he thought too much to produce,—the analytical power interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems from Coleridge’s ‘Christabelle.’” This judgment of one great poet and critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving.

80.

Coleridge says, “In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”

He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

In another place he says,—

“Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.”

There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of intellect—it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, “that like her father she had the controversial intellect without the controversial spirit.”

81.

We all remember the famous bon mot of Talleyrand. When seated between Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Staël suddenly asked him if she and Madame Récamier fell into the river, which of the two he would save first? “Madame,” replied Talleyrand, “je crois que vous savez nager!” Now we will match this pretty bon mot with one far prettier, and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for whom, vaurien as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said to him, “If your mother and myself were both to fall into this river, whom would you save first?” “My mother!” he instantly replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, “To save you first would be as if I were to save myself first!”

82.

If we were not always bringing ourselves into comparison with others, we should know them better.

83.

There are ways of governing every mind which lies within the circle described by our own; the only question is, whether the means required be such as we can use? and if so, whether we shall think it right to do so?

You think I do not know you, or that I mistake you utterly, because I am actuated by the impulses of my own nature, rather than by my perception of the impulses of yours? It is not so.

If we would retain our own consistency, without which there is no moral strength, we must stand firm upon our own moral life.

“Be true unto thyself; And it shall follow as the night to day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is not merely to allow to them the same independence, but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here lies the chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in Religion, where there is a strong, sincere, definite faith, there is generally more or less intolerance; so in character, where there is strong individuality, self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality of others. In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being strikes a discord.

84.

If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,—revealed us to ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,—yet has survived all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror of such a revelation.

85.

F has much, much to learn! Through power, through passion, through feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and sympathy we learn much; hence it is that minds highly gifted often remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or chiefly for their art, their faculties bent on creating or representing, remain immature on one side—the reasoning and reflecting side of the character.

86.

Said a Frenchman of his adversary, “Il se croit supérieur à moi de toute la hauteur de sa bêtise!” There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and acrimony, in this phrase quite untranslatable.

87.

It is a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction between rêver and rêvasser. The one implies meditation on a definite subject: the other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion, aimless thoughts.

88.

It seems to me that the conversation of the first converser in the world would tire me, pall on me at last, where I am not sure of the sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and where it does not gingle, it jars.

89.

There are few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the productions of mediæval art, we find this pervading idea; and we must understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to apprehend the entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind.

For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the practical, but the strongest sympathy with the contemplative life. I bow to Leah and to Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.

90.

Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water, like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she is nature; she is like the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own life.

91.

Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay’s Roman Ballads. “But,” said some one, “do you really account them as poetry?” She replied, “They are poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!”

92.

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate dissembling, but a “cunning mind” emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That “pleasure in deceiving and aptness to be deceived” usually go together, was one of the wise sayings of the wisest of men.

93.

It was a saying of Paracelsus, that “Those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in man:” meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come to this conclusion only late in life.

Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,—a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,—represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled solely by the appetite to know. He asks nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using them like instruments, cheating them like children,—all for their good; but it will not do. In Aprile, “who would love infinitely, and be beloved,” is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty, resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.

“I too have sought to know as thou to LOVE, Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge; Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake! _***** “Are we not halves of one dissever’d world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?—Never! Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower, Love—until both are saved!”

After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another form—the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;—yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to be human; to love as well as to know;—to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.

94.

Lord Bacon says: “I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation.” (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)

He adds, “It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant” (i. e. colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are beginning to discover and act upon this great moral truth and obvious fitness of things!—like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!

95.

Because in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the reverse.

Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught.

For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.

It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the moral standard for women low, or vice versâ. This has appeared to me the very commonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much in the world, but fatal nevertheless, and in three ways; first, as distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience; secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong; thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of Christianity. Admit these premises, and it follows inevitably that such a mistake is fatal in the last degree, as disturbing the consistency and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously.

Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact, the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree in which these are balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that individual character—its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as essentially feminine will be considered as essentially human, such as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty, and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps, what Buffon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with the progress of humanity, “Les races se féminisent;” at least I understand the phrase in this sense.

A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at the cowardly subterfuges and small arts of women as being feminine;—a woman who requires from her own sex tenderness and purity, and thinks ruffianism and sensuality pardonable in a man as being masculine,—these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us—that standard which we have accepted as Christians—theoretically at least—and which makes no distinction between “the highest, holiest manhood,” and the highest, holiest womanhood.

I might illustrate this position not only scripturally but philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates,—“The virtue of the man and the woman is the same;” which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort of anticipation of the Christian doctrine, even in the pagan times. But I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poetical, and plain to the most prejudiced among men or women.

Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart, the poem entitled “The Happy Warrior.” It has been quoted often as an epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of merely substituting the word woman for the word warrior, and changing the feminine for the masculine pronoun, will find that it reads equally well; that almost from beginning to end it is literally as applicable to the one sex as to the other. As thus:—

CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN. Who is the happy woman? Who is she That every woman born should wish to be? It is the generous spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, had wrought Upon the plan that pleased her childish thought; Whose high endeavours are an inward light, That make the path before her always bright: Who, with a natural instinct to discern What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; Abides by this resolve, and stops not there, But makes her moral being her prime care; Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train! Turns that necessity to glorious gain; In face of these doth exercise a power Which is our human nature’s highest dower: Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives; By objects, which might force the soul to abate Her feeling, rendered more compassionate; Is placable—because occasions rise So often that demand such sacrifice; More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure As tempted more; more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. ’Tis she whose law is reason; who depends Upon that law as on the best of friends; Whence in a state where men are tempted still To evil for a guard against worse ill, And what in quality or act is best, Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, She fixes good on good alone, and owes To virtue every triumph that she knows. Who, if she rise to station of command, Rises by open means; and there will stand On honourable terms, or else retire. ***** Who comprehends her trust, and to the same Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim; And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state; Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall Like showers of manna, if they come at all: Whose powers shed round her in the common strife Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace; But who, if she be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issue, good or bad for human kind, Is happy as a lover; and attired With sudden brightness, like to one inspired; And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what she foresaw; Or if an unexpected call succeed, Come when it will, is equal to the need!

In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be feminised in its significance,—that which I have filled up with asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal of A Happy Woman. It is the line—

“And in himself possess his own desire.”

No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence of all external affections as these words express. “Her desire is to her husband,”—this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her affections, does not “in herself possess her own desire;” she turns towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not.

Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy with women; and I have sometimes thought that the exaggeration, even to morbidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this want of sympathy; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it.

He says, “I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not equally detestable in both.” Then, remarking that cowardice is an infirmity generally allowed to women, he wonders that they should fancy it becoming or graceful, or think it worth improving by affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty.

Here is a passage from one of Humboldt’s letters, which I have seen quoted with sympathy and admiration, as applied to the manly character only:—

“Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of man.”

Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character.

“Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good woman; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman.”

After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most un-christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early against the acceptance of the larger truth?

It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood, as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never can exclude the mother.

Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely straightforward fashion:—

“Je dis que les mâles et les fémelles sont jettés en même moule; sauf l’institution et l’usage la différence n’y est pas grande. Platon appelle indifféremment les uns et les autres à la société de touts études, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrières et paisibles en sa république, et le philosophe Antisthènes ôtait toute distinction entre leur vertu et la nôtre. Il est bien plus aisé d’accuser un sexe que d’excuser l’autre: c’est ce qu’on dit, ‘le fourgon se moque de la poële.’”

Not that I agree with Plato,—rather would leave all the fighting, military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.

Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency,—“The woman’s strength consists in her weakness!” as if it were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and so cruel.

I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman’s nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior woman, whereas I know twenty—fifty—of a very inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.

The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual endowments morally perverted; for in a woman’s nature there is such a necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she loves,—a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her being,—that while the instincts remain true and the feelings uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray. Thus fell “our general mother,”—type of her sex,—overpowered, rather than deceived, by the colossal intellect,—half serpent, half angelic.

Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider chastity as if it were a thing—a thing which might be lost or kept by external accident—a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to God and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common, the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders, and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim; but if the sufferer be the wife of the oppressor, it is a point of etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the brute man to do what he likes “with his own.” Even the victim herself, if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor woman in the “Médecin malgré lui:”—“Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui vent empêcher les maris de battre leurs femmes!—et si je veux qu’il me batte, moi?”—and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.

“Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la société out semés sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de s’entourer de barrières que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable de s’approprier l’existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise dont les pieds ont été mutilés et pour laquelle toute liberté est un leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que l’éducation ait donné aux femmes leur véritable place, malheur à celles qui brisent les lisses accoutumées! pour elles l’indépendance ne sera, comme la gloire, qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur!”—B. Constant.

This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress the intellect,—no longer.

Here is another:—

“L’expérience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur âge, ou leur caractère, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le même rêve, et qu’elles avaient toutes au fond du cœur un roman commencé dont elles attendaient jusqu’à la mort le héros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie.”

This “roman commencé,” (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what are the “barrières” which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso,” where Justina conquers the fiend only by not consenting to ill!

——“This agony Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul May sweep imagination in its storm; The will is firm.”

And the baffled demon shrinks back,—

“Woman, thou hast subdued me Only by not owning thyself subdued!”

A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her interposed, with stern sarcasm, “Speak out! Give things their proper names! Half words are the perdition of women!”

“I observe,” said Sydney Smith, “that generally about the age of forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest.” This was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because, generally, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.

Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.

Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.

“La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n’a jamais réussi, quoique souvent essayée; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et particulièrement de l’amour pour conduire l’homme à la vertu. Dans cette route l’homme s’arrête toujours en chemin. L’amour inspire beaucoup de bons sentiments—le courage, le dévouement, le sacrifice des biens et de la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-même, et c’est là que la faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits.”—St. Marc-Girardin.

I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true—or, if true, it is true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of self-sacrifice.

“Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end; For this the passion to excess was driven, That self might be annull’d.”

In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.

Our present social opinion says to the man, “You may be a vulgar brutal sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be held blameless.” And to the woman it says, “You shall be guilty of nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as the most desperate criminal.”

96.

“It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others.”—Dr. Holland.

Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in its mother’s arms, before it could speak, begin to whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch of most truthful nature in Wordsworth’s description of the desolation of Margaret:—

“Her little child Had from its mother caught the trick of grief, And sighed amid its playthings.”

97.

“Letters,” said Sir James Mackintosh, “must not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley’s letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not business, and must never appear to be occupation;—nor must letters.”

“A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigné’s genius are exquisitely charming, but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Staël are above the distinctions of sex.”

98.

Of the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Staël once said with most admirable and prophetic sense:—“It is a contest between a man who is the enemy of liberty, and a system which is equally its enemy.” But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot get rid of their system.

99.

The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. “If the Emperor, your father,” said the Hetman, “had taken my advice, your Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes.” “What was your advice?” asked the Empress. “To put all the nobility to death, and transplant the people into Russia.” “But that,” said the Empress, “would have been cruel!” “I do not see that,” he replied quietly; “they are all dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been taken.”

Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian logic!

100.

It was the Abbé Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of snuff, and answered gravely, “Why, for fear the bishops should read me!”

101.

When Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, “Je sens les tourmens de l’enfer!”

“Déjà?” said Talleyrand.

Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover she has rejected. She frets at the contretemps. He makes use of the occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still he pleads—still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.

“Déjà!” exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce it, depends the dénouement of the piece.

102.

Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added, “Il y manque deux choses; nos curés et nos hospitalières;” that is, he felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and will be supplied.

103.

Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly, is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity embraces an immense extent of objects and objections,—just as, they say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less likely to shy.

104.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realises itself.

105.

There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.

106.

There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.

107.

If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes brood over the heart like doves of peace,—they sometimes suck out our life-blood like vampires.

108.

To a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for the things themselves, and he pronounces the words amour, grâce, sensibilité, as if with a relish in his mouth—as if he tasted them—as if he possessed them.

109.

There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is that we so continually hear the phrase, “a virtuous woman,” and scarcely ever that of a “virtuous man,” except in poetry or from the pulpit.

110.

A lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,—like a dead wasp.

111.

“On me dit toute la journée dans le monde, telle opinion, telle idée, sont reçues. On ne sait donc pas qu’en fait d’opinion, et d’idées j’aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejettées que celles qui sont reçues?”

112.

“Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice.” And thence do you infer the superiority of sense over phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby a foretaste of our immortality.

113.

“Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence.”—Southey.

Goethe did not think so. “Genutzt dem Augenblick,” “Use the present,” was his favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past and lay the foundation for the future.

114.

“Je allseitigen, je individueller,” is a beautiful significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that mind becomes.

115.

“I wonder,” said C., “that facts should be called stubborn things.” I wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms. “Il n’y a rien qui s’arrange aussi facilement que les faits,”—Nothing so tractable as facts,—said Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,—or as one should say, mere matter of fact,—you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.

116.

Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many, or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the sympathies, rather than of the intellect.

It was said, and very beautifully said, that “one man’s wit becomes all men’s wisdom.” Even more true is it that one man’s virtue becomes a standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.

117.

It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes of that pain.

118.

“Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous clear sight had been a delusion.”—Blanco White.

Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.

He says in another place:—

“I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life. I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence were already an insupportable burden on my soul.”

How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the heart which “asks not happiness, but longs for rest!”

119.

“Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for an example.”

120.

Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and expediency:—“You blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man’s bell!”

121.

I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too young a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end, it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned; but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength, leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.

122.

“There is a way to separate memory from imagination—we may narrate without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols: such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed, and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:—it is a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the novel-writer.”—Blanco White.

True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a proverb we have heard quoted: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” But better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.

123.

However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling. As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it has itself instituted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of no distinction but those which it can recognise—external distinctions.

We hear it said that general society—the world, as it is called—and a public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the other the boy, “finds, as the phrase is, his own level.” He does not; he finds the level of others. That may be good for those below mediocrity, but for those above it bad: and it is for those we should most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to assimilate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many a man.

124.

“Il me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le ciel et la terre, le plus beau don que Dieu ait fait à l’homme, la pensée, l’inspiration, se décompose en quelque sorte dès qu’elle est descendue dans son âme. Elle y vient simple et désintéressée; il la reproduit corrompue par tous les intérêts auxquels il l’associe; elle lui a été confiée pour la multiplier à l’avantage de tous; il la publie au profit de son amour-propre.”—Madame de Saint-Aulaire.

There would be much to say about this, for it is not always, nor generally, amour-propre or interest; it is the desire of sympathy, which impels the artist mind to the utterance in words, or the expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent into his soul.

125.

Milton’s Eve is the type of the masculine standard of perfection in woman; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, much “coy submission,” and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall risk perdition.

And the woman’s standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands subjection, and is so indulgent that he gives up to blandishment what he would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns.

126.

Every subject which excites discussion impels to thought. Every expression of a mind humbly seeking truth, not assuming to have found it, helps the seeker after truth.

128.

As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,—bleeding at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to heaven, and says, “God be praised! I suffer no more!” because to that past sharp agony the respite comes like peace—like sleep,—so we stand, after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,—but of what kind?

129.

To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,—may this be mine.

A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.

(FROM A LETTER.)

We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off. All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses, schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which lies in most cases beyond our reach—the spirit sent from God. What do we know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever—just so much material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according to our will or our prejudices,—fitted to certain purposes according to our notions of expediency. Till we know how to reverence childhood we shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some condition of being which is to follow—as if it were something separate from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own sake,—something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put together at pleasure—ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!

And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts, perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without self-consciousness,—sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation—what do we know of all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives, and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief. Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to children what is not possible, exact from them what is impossible;—ignore many things which the child has neither words to express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated. What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it—it is fearful!

Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful childhood, a suffering childhood, are among the worst.

O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for children,—for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,—do you, when you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters, and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician, the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your facts remain a dead letter.

I say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that lowest part of our duty to children. Men, it is generally allowed, teach better than women because they have been better taught the things they teach. Women train better than men because of their quick instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child, brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school, watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal with that spirit which has come out of nature’s hands unless we remember what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made up of separate parts, but is one—is a progressive whole. When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

121.

I will here put together some recollections of my own child-life; not because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence, but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many children; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered from the same or similar unseen causes even under external conditions and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct in education. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as it goes; not something between the false and the true, garnished for effect,—not something half-remembered, half-imagined,—but plain, absolute, matter of fact.

No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,—at least so it was said twenty times a day. But looking back now, I do not think I was particular even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than the usual amount of mischief—so called—which every lively active child perpetrates between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the usual dislike to learn; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did not learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could not teach me; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing, tumultuous life of our youth rises up between us and those first years; but as the torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never more forget!

In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to me—blessings on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate, but not, as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the little Mozart, ask of every one around me, “Do you love me?” The instinctive question was, rather, “Can I love you?” Yet certainly I was not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and the recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I guarded myself against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror, and even a sort of disgust.

With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then appeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance. I imagined the house of my enemy on fire, and rushed through the flames to rescue her. She was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I forced bars and bolts to deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance; for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation to my adversary; to myself the rôle of superiority and gratified pride. For several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by religious influences—they passed over my mind, and did not at the time sink into it,—and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after life; so it has been, must be, with all those who, in fighting out alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above them; so it has been, must be, with all strong natures. Will it be said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be so with some who survive the contest; but then, how many sink! how many are crippled morally for life! how many, strengthened in some particular faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character as a whole! This is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the character, if I had been of a timid or retiring nature. It was expelled at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and self-reliance.

In regard to truth—always such a difficulty in education,—I certainly had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,—a mistake into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie was wicked; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked—it was dishonourable. But I had no compunction about telling fictions;—inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real, and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of impossibilities. In this respect “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude,” was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my own mind on this and some other important points.

I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate: but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the will was petrified, and I absolutely could not comply. They might have hacked me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.

There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always unacknowledged. It was fear—fear of darkness and supernatural influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end, literally “like quills upon the fretful porcupine,” and one hand with all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job—“A spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof:”—and if not intelligible voices, there were strange unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to defy all power and brave all danger,—that is, all danger I could see. I remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only with a little stick; but first I said the Lord’s Prayer fervently. In the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and does not encourage—the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the evil.

People, in general, even those who have been much interested in education, are not aware of the sacred duty of truth, exact truth in their intercourse with children. Limit what you tell them according to the measure of their faculties; but let what you say be the truth. Accuracy not merely as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use of words, is essential with children. I have read some wise book on the treatment of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in speaking is prescribed as a curative principle; and deception for any purpose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now, it is a good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive; and that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure or confined air.

Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints, one of which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled for the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child, who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would be burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a lively, amiable woman, was probably much amused by the question, and an swered, giddily, “Oh, of course,—certainly!” and was believed implicitly. But thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that child was haunted and tortured by the image of her mother springing into the devouring flames, and consumed by fire, with all the accessories of the picture, particularly the drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker organisation, the results might have been permanent and serious. But to proceed.

These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power over me vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,—the propensity to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began when I was about eight or nine years old to haunt my inner life. I can truly say that, from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence; one outward, linking me with the external sensible world, the other inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself only. I carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures; one springing out of another, and coloured and modified by increasing knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there were moments—as when I came to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,—when I was not more awake to outward things than in sleep,—scarcely took cognisance of the beings around me. When punished for idleness by being placed in solitary confinement (the worst of all punishments for children), the intended penance was nothing less than a delight and an emancipation, giving me up to my dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life; but nothing of this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in possessing something which her power could not reach. My reveries were my real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.

Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from every eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we are aware of a thousand influences and processes at work of which we have no exact knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and use accordingly,—so it is with education. And secondly, it may be asked, if such secret processes be working unconscious mischief, where the remedy? The remedy is in employment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes with astonishment, “Employment! the child is employed from morning till night; she is learning a dozen sciences and languages; she has masters and lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil, her piano, her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,—what can she want more?” An energetic child even at a very early age, and yet farther as the physical organisation is developed, wants something more and something better; employment which shall bring with it the bond of a higher duty than that which centres in self and self-improvement; employment which shall not merely cultivate the understanding, but strengthen and elevate the conscience; employment for the higher and more generous faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies; employment which has the aim of utility, not pretended, but real, obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a mere child is not always being taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as combined in due degree with desire and anticipation.

The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness, apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would have been both.

There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of them? A knowledge of what people call “common things”—of the elements of physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most economical and most beneficial way of applying both,—these should form a part of the system of every girls’ school—whether for the higher or the lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and attending Faraday’s lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of her husband’s wages through want of management.

In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my nature was exhausted in airy visions!

As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons; or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws,—except those which I made myself,—no caged birds nor tormented kittens.

Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early, instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I cannot tell now—it was so; and if this sympathy with the external, living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated, and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were, unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the appearances of nature did truly “haunt me like a passion;” the stars were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore, the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon; these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind is distinct. Wordsworth’s poem of “The Daffodils,” the one beginning—

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,”

may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson’s “Seasons” a favourite book when I first began to read for my own amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre’s “Indian Cottage” (“La Chaumière Indienne”) was also charming, either because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in pictures of an external world quite different from that I inhabited,—palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing draperies; and the “Arabian Nights” completed my Oriental intoxication, which lasted for a long time.

I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have been one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made. For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and Goldsmith’s “History of England,” which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven and ten years old. He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in language I passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in words to wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or interpreted for myself—right or wrong.

No; I repeat, Shakspeare—bless him!—never did me any moral mischief. Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,—though the Ghost in Hamlet terrified me (the picture that is,—for the spirit in Shakspeare was solemn and pathetic, not hideous),—though poor little Arthur cost me an ocean of tears,—yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new, beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays, and far less than the Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cymbeline. It may be thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or to be understood by a child:—no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not witty and wicked—only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the Fourth,—the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.

Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me, not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer’s Odyssey (lent to me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures through blinding tears, I saw that picture of Rubens, which all remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in which the child, scared by its father’s dazzling helm and nodding crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.

The same parish clerk—a curious fellow in his way—lent me also some religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all Shakspeare’s plays together. These so-called pious tracts first introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a vulgar religion,—the fear of being hanged and the fear of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself into this,—that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out, that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!

About Religion:—I was taught religion as children used to be taught it in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I believe—through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson book, as the custom then was. The letter of the Scriptures—the words—were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long before I could enter into the spirit. Meantime, happily, another religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to me quite apart from that which was taught,—which, indeed, I never in any way regarded as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite another thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into my head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no pains were spared to indoctrinate me, and all my pastors and masters took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could be more confused and heterodox.

It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old. Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed, or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company, until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming so from sheer vanity.

The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he taught the multitude in parables.

A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old), and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on a volume of Sir William Jones’s works—his Persian grammar—it revived my Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given was a Persian fable or poem—one of those traditions of our Lord which are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of “St. Peter and the Cherries,” which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from memory.

“Jesus,” says the story, “arrived one evening at the gates of a certain city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the market place.

“And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together looking at an object on the ground; and he drew near to see what it might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man.

“And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.

“‘Faugh!’ said one, stopping his nose; ‘it pollutes the air.’ ‘How long,’ said another, ‘shall this foul beast offend our sight?’ ‘Look at his torn hide,’ said a third; ‘one could not even cut a shoe out of it.’ ‘And his ears,’ said a fourth, ‘all draggled and bleeding!’ ‘No doubt,’ said a fifth, ‘he hath been hanged for thieving!’

“And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead creature, he said, ‘Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!’

“Then the people turned towards him with amazement, and said among themselves, ‘Who is this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only He could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;’ and being ashamed, they bowed their heads before him, and went each on his way.”

I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening and pathetic impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful, and I took the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of falling into the opposite extreme,—of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of the corrupt and the repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition, might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has ever completely righted itself, I am not sure.

Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute are the perceptions, and how permanent the memories, of children. I remember experiments tried upon my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware of this, by their being repeated, and, in some instances, spoken of, before me. Music, to which I was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes made the medium of these experiments. Discordant sounds were not only hateful, but made me turn white and cold, and sent the blood backward to my heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I cannot now account for: for though, when heard for the first time, they had little effect, they became intolerable by repetition; they turned up some hidden emotion within me too strong to be borne. It could not have been from association, which I believe to be a principal element in the emotion excited by music. I was too young for that. What associations could such a baby have had with pleasure or with pain? Or could it be possible that associations with some former state of existence awoke up to sound? That our life “hath elsewhere its beginning, and cometh from afar,” is a belief or at least an instinct, in some minds, which music, and only music, seems to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright—she was then Fanny Kemble—used to come to our house, and used to entrance me with her singing. I had a sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with pleasure when I only heard her step. But her voice!—it has charmed hundreds since; whom has it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of me,—fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of playing these experiments on me. The music of “Paul and Virginia” was then in vogue, and there was one air—a very simple air—in that opera, which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush out of the room. I became at last aware that this was sometimes done by particular desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest others by the display of such vehement emotion. My infant conscience became perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it. People are not always aware of the injury done to children by repeating before them things they say, or describing things they do: words and actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and conscious. I can speak of the injury done to myself, between five and eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious actress,—danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other children,—but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment excited in my mind.

This is enough. All that has been told here refers to a period between five and ten years old.

THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.

(FROM THE GERMAN.)

Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell upon a tree standing in the old primeval forest and kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And it happened that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a distance, and, forcing his way through the thicket, he flung himself down in rapture before the blazing tree.

“O divine light and warmth!” he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms. “O blessed! O heaven-descended Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro’ every pulse, how lost, how cold, how dark have I dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life! remain ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial influence, send love and joy to illuminate my soul!”

And the Fire answered and said to him, “It is true that my birth is from heaven, but I am now, through mingling with earthly elements, subdued to earthly influences; therefore, beware how you choose me for thy friend, without having first studied my twofold nature. O youth! take heed lest what appear to thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future time, to fiery pain and death.” And the youth replied, “No! O no! thou blessed Fire, this could never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee; let me be thy priest, to watch and tend thee truly. Ofttimes in my wild wintry life, when the chill darkness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my hair, have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,—of the sunshine that should light up the world within me and the world around me. But still that time came not. It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished utterly before the light and the warmth had reached me, had it not been for thee!”

Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the Fire answered him in murmured tones, while her beams with a softer radiance played over his cheek and brow: “Be it so then. Yet do thou watch me constantly and minister to me carefully; neglect me not, leave me not to myself, lest the light and warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly, and there be no redress; and O watch thyself also! beware lest thou too ardently stir up my impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead of life, and love, and joy, I bring thee only death and burning pain!” And the youth passionately vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all went well. How often, for hours together, would he lie gazing entranced toward the radiant beneficent Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing now a leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a handful of odorous gums, as incense, upon the flame, which gracefully curling and waving upwards, quivering and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into the glowing depths, marvellous shapes, fairy visions dancing and glancing along. Then he would sing to her songs full of love, and she, responding to the song she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in softest whispers, so loving and so low, that even the jealous listening woods could not overhear; at other times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him all the wonders and the beauties which lay around him, hitherto veiled from his sight.

But at length, as he became accustomed to the glory and the warmth, and nothing more was left for the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal, then he began to weary and to dream again of the morning, and to long for the sun-beams; and it was to him as if the fire stood between him and the sun’s light, and he reproached her therefore, and he became moody and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same, but unquiet and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily, sometimes throwing out a lurid glare. And when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she drooped and waned, and crept in dying gleams along the damp ground, his heart would fail him with a sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with such a rough and lavish hand that the indignant fire hissed thereat, and burst forth in a smoky sullen gleam,—then died away again. Then the youth, half sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how bright, how glowing, how dazzling was the flame in those former happy days, when it played over his chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon his brow, and he desired eagerly to recall that once inspiring glow. And he stirred up the embers violently till they burned him, and then he grew angry, and then again he wearied of all the watching and the care which the subtle, celestial, tameless element required at his hand: and at length, one day in a sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from the fountain and poured it hastily on the yet living flame.——

For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven, shed a last gleam upon the pale brow of the youth, and then sank down in darkness extinguished for ever!

PAULINA. from an unfinished tale, 1823. And think’st thou that the fond o’erflowing love I bear thee in my heart could ever be Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove, And beam on others as they beam on me? Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell, And struggle for expression! or set free From the o’er mastering spirit’s proud control The pain that throbs in silence at my soul, Perhaps—yet no—I will not sue, nor bend, To win a heartless pity—Let it end! I have been near thee still at morn, at eve; Have mark’d thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve; Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears, Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears: And communed with thy heart, till I made mine The echo and the mirror unto thine. And I have sat and looked into thine eyes As men on earth look to the starry skies, That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies! Too quickly I read mine,—I knew it well,— I judg’d not of thy heart by all it gave, But all that it withheld; and I could tell The very sea-mark where affection’s wave Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again, And knew my lavish love was pour’d in vain, As fruitless streams o’er sandy deserts melt, Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt! ****

LINES.—1840.

Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast, And fold me there in everlasting rest, The long day is o’er! I’m weary, I would sleep— But deep, deep, Never to waken more! I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved What life could give; have lov’d, have been belov’d; I am sick, and heart sore, And weary,—let me sleep! But deep, deep, Never to waken more! To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come, Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home; Shut down the marble door, And leave me,—let me sleep! But deep, deep, Never to waken more! Now I lie down,—I close my aching eyes, If on this night another morn must rise, Wake me not, I implore! I only ask to sleep, And deep, deep, Never to waken more!