VESUVIUS.
NEARLY two thousand years ago there was a mountain, and its name was Vesuvius. From the foot of it to the very top it was almost like a garden.
At the bottom were two great cities, called Herculaneum and Pompeii. The mountain is there now, and near it is the city of Naples in Italy.
One day, when everything was going on in those great cities just as usual, an awful sound was heard like the firing of ten thousand of the biggest cannon; the earth shook as if it was going to pieces, then it grew dark like night. The sky was filled with flying cinders, or something like ashes; the air had a sulphurous smell. All the people wondered. Some ran into the street, some took to the boats and rowed away as fast as possible, some screamed. Children clung to their mothers, hiding their faces in their dresses. Animals broke away and ran furiously, dashing themselves against the rocks or plunging into the sea; the very birds sighed as they swept through the sky.
ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS, 1880.
The mountain—this Vesuvius—was on fire; the fire was spouting from its top in terrific forms. Smoke, such as you have never seen it, leaped as the darkest thunder clouds upward, while melted earth and rock ran down the sides of Vesuvius like a devouring flood. Before it, the gardens fled away. On it came, rushing, foaming, burning. It leaped upon the houses and buried them, whole streets at once. So suddenly it came that few of the people escaped. What a time was that!
Think of a whole city, like Philadelphia, buried ten or twenty feet deep, so that in the place of the grand palaces, stores and temples, nothing was seen but a smoking furnace—red-hot lava!
Not a great while since people began to dig. They dug and dug, and after years of digging there were the streets again and buildings, the merchant selling his goods, babies sleeping in their mamma’s arms, a bride and groom standing up to be married, a funeral procession coming from a house, a miser counting his money, a cruel father beating his child, a loving mother kissing her son, a marriage feast in this house, a dying parent in that. Just as the fierce, quick flood of lava found them, so it buried them, and so they were found after nearly two thousand years!
Since that awful day the volcano, Vesuvius, has been on fire again and again.
L.
AURORA LEIGH.
(English Literature Papers.)
HOW many of my Pansies are acquainted with her? She is “a woman in a book,” and the book was written by a woman of whom you have surely heard—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I want you to know something about this story book and its author. There are those who think the story is too “grown-up” to interest children; but that is because they do not understand certain kinds of children very well. When I was a little girl of ten, I was very fond of narrative poems, and read some which were judged far above my understanding.
Would you like a picture of Aurora’s room, as she describes it? Listen:
“I had a little chamber in the house
As green as any privet hedge a bird
Might choose to build in. . . .
The walls were green, the carpet was pure green,
The straight small bed was curtained greenly,
And the folds hung green about the window,
Which let in the out-door world with all its greenery.
You could not push your head out and escape
A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle.”
Poor Aurora lost her mother when she was four years old, and her dear, dear father when she was just a little girl. Then she sailed across the ocean from her home in Italy to her father’s old home in England. When she first saw English soil, this is the way she felt:
. . . “oh, the frosty cliffs looked cold upon me!
Could I find a home among those mean red houses,
Through the fog? . . . Was this my father’s England?
......
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible quick pulses. Brown hair
Pricked with gray by frigid use of life.
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth ... eyes of no color;
Once they might have smiled, but never, never
Have forgot themselves in smiling.”
You cannot imagine, I think, any life more unlike what Aurora had been used to in her home in Florence, than the one to which she came in England. She describes her aunt’s life as—
“A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear Heaven, how silly are the things
That live in thickets, and eat berries!
I, alas, a wild bird scarcely fledged,
Was brought to her cage, and she was there to meet me.
Very kind! ‘Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed!’”
You wonder what sort of a little girl she was? She tells us:
“I was a good child on the whole,
A meek and manageable child. Why not?
I did not live to have the faults of life.
There seemed more true life in my father’s grave
Than in all England. . . . . .
At first I felt no life which was not patience;
Did the thing she bade me, without heed
To a thing beyond it; sat in just the chair she placed
With back against the window, to exclude
The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,
Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods
To bring the house a message.”
So quiet was she, and pale, and sad, that her aunt’s friends visiting there, whispered about her that “the child from Florence looked ill, and would not live long.” This made her glad, for she was homesick for her father’s grave. But her cousin, Romney Leigh, a boy somewhat older than herself, took her to task for this. He said to her:
“You’re wicked now. You wish to die,
And leave the world a-dusk for others,
With your naughty light blown out.”
Well, she did not die, but lived to be a sweet, proud, brave, foolish, sorrowful, glad, happy woman! You think my words contradict one another? No; they may belong to one life, and often do.
I do not mean that you will be interested in all her story—hers and “Cousin Romney’s”—not yet awhile. Some day you will read it, study it, I hope, for the beauty of the language, and for the moral power there is in it. Just now, my main object is to introduce you, so that when you hear the name “Aurora Leigh,” you may be able to say: “I know her; she is one of Mrs. Browning’s characters—a little girl from Florence, who lived with an aunt in England.” Or when you hear Mrs. Browning’s name, you will say, or think: “She wrote a long poem once, named Aurora Leigh.”
Why should you care to know that? Because, my dear, it is a little crumb of knowledge about English Literature, a study which I am hoping you are going to greatly enjoy by and by.
Oh! Mrs. Browning wrote many other poems, though the one about which we have been talking is perhaps considered her greatest. There are some which I think you must know and love. For instance:
“Little Ellie sits alone
’Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow,
On her shining hair and face.
“She has thrown her bonnet by,
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water’s flow;
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands, all sleek and dripping,
While she rocketh to and fro.
“Little Ellie sits alone,
And the smile she softly uses
Fills the silence like a speech;
While she thinks what shall be done—
And the sweetest pleasure chooses
For her future within reach.”
There are seventeen verses; of course I have not room for them, but you will like to find the poem and read for yourselves. It is entitled “The Romance of the Swan’s Nest.”
Then there is that wonderful poem of hers called “The Cry of the Children.” Surely you ought to know of that. It was suggested to her by reading the report which told about children being employed in the mines and manufactories of England. It is said that Mrs. Browning’s poem was the means of pushing an act of Parliament which forbade the employment of young children in this way. The poem has thirteen long verses, every one of which you should carefully read. Let me give you just a taste:
“Do you hear the children weeping, O, my brothers!
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears!
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west;
But the young, young children, O, my brothers!
They are weeping bitterly.
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
......
“‘True,’ say the children, ‘it may happen
That we die before our time;
Little Alice died last year; her grave is shapen
Like a snowball in the rime.
We looked into the pit prepared to take her;
There’s no room for any work in the coarse clay;
From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,
Crying ‘Get up, little Alice! it is day.’
If you listen by that grave in sun and shower,
With your ear down, little Alice never cries.
Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,
For the smile has time for growing in her eyes.
And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled
In the shroud by the kirk-chime.
‘It is good, when it happens,’ say the children,
‘That we die before our time.’”
It will never do to take more room with this paper, and I have told you almost nothing about the dear lady who voiced the children’s cry so wonderfully, and to such purpose! Suppose you let me take her story, little bits of it, for the next Pansy. Besides, I want to introduce you to her dear “Flush.”
Pansy.
MRS. BROWNING’S AURORA LEIGH.