THOUGHTS IN A LIBRARY
A great library! What a mass of human misery is here commemorated!—how many buried hopes surround us!
The author of that work was the greatest natural philosopher that ever enlightened mankind. His biographers are now disputing whether at one period of his life he was not of unsound mind—but all agree that he was afterwards able to understand his own writings.
The author of those numerous volumes was logician, metaphysician, natural historian, philosopher; his sanity was never doubted, and with his last breath he regretted his birth, mourned over his life, expressed his fear of death, and called upon the Cause of causes to pity him. His slightest thoughts continued to domineer over the world for ages, until they were in some measure silenced by those works which contain the unfettered meditations of a very great man, who, being more careless than corrupt in the administration of his high office, has gone down to posterity, as
'The wisest, brightest, meanest, of mankind.'
For his wisdom has embalmed his meanness.
Those volumes contain the weighty, if not wise opinions of one who, amidst penury and wretchedness, first learnt to moralize with companions as poor and wretched as himself. Even in his latter years, when sought by a monarch, and listened to with submission by all who approached him, his life can scarcely be called a happy one; yet he must have enjoyed some moments of triumph, if not of happiness, in contemplating the severe but well-merited rebuke which he inflicted upon that courtier, who could behold his difficulties with all the indifference that belongs to good breeding, and then thought fit, in the hour of his success, to encumber him with paltry praises.
Those poems were the burning words of one
'... Cradled into poetry by wrong,
Who learnt in suffering what he taught in song.'
The slightest foibles of this unhappy man have been brought into odious prominence, for he was the favourite author of his age, and therefore the property of the public.
That boyish book absolved its author from a father's cares; and he was one to whom those cares would have been dearest joys, who loved to look upon a poor man's child. Listen to the music of his sadness—
'I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolv'd in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion!'
The sharp arrows of criticism were successfully directed against that next volume, and are said to have been the means of hurrying its author to that world of dreams and shadows, for which, in the critic's opinion, he was so pre-eminently fitted.
'Where is the youth, for deeds immortal born,
Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn,
And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream
Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream?'
You already smile, my friend; but to know the heights and the depths, you must turn your attention to those numberless, unread, unheard-of volumes. Their authors did not suffer from the severity of the critic or the judge, but were only neglected. If Mephistopheles ever requires rest and seclusion—But, hark! is there not a laugh? and that grotesque face in the carved woodwork, how scoffingly it is looking down upon us!—Sir A. Helps. Thoughts in a Cloister.