XIII.
I saw it all but now. The grin
That gnarled old Gardener Sandy’s features;
My father, scholar-like and thin,
Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;
I saw—ah me—I saw again
My dear and deprecating mother;
And then, remembering the cane,
Regretted—THAT I’D LEFT THE OTHER.
THINGS GONE BY.
Is it that things go by, or is it that people go by the things? If the former, it is no wonder that a good deal of gloom hangs about the matter. To be standing still, and to have a panorama constantly moving by one, bearing on its face all things fair and beautiful—happy love scenes, kindly friends, pleasant meetings, wise speeches, noble acts, stirring words, national epochs, as well as gay landscapes of hill and dale, and river and sun, and shade and trees, and cottages and labouring men and grazing cattle; to have all things moving by one, and oneself to stagnate and alone to be left behind, as all else moves on to greet the young, the hopeful, and the untried,—there is indeed something sad in this. We have seen these good and beautiful and soul-touching visions once. They charmed and entranced us as they lingered with us for a few brief and blissful moments, but they have gone by and left us alone. We shall never look upon them again. Yes, it is bitter—too bitter almost for man to dwell upon much. He must turn elsewhere, and try to bury the past in forgetfulness, gazing on the new visions as they in turn pass by him, knowing that their time is short, and that they too, like all the old ones, will very soon be as though they were not.
But it is not so. Man is passing the world by, and not the world man. Man is passing on, year after year, in his magnificent and irresistible course, never losing, and ever gaining. All he sees, and knows, and feels, and does becomes an inseparable part of himself, far more closely bound up with his life and nature than even his flesh, and nerves, and bones. It is not merely that he remembers the past and loves the past, but he is the past; and he is more the whole assembly of the past than he is anything else whatever. Man alone moves onward to perfection and to happiness, as a universe stands still ministering to his lordly progress. Even the life, the passions, and the personal progress of each particular man stand still, as it were, in the service of all the rest, and become their lasting and inalienable treasure. Nothing is wasted or irreparable but wrong-doing, and that too is not lost.
THINGS GONE BY.
“Once more, who would not be a boy?”—or girl? and revel in the delights—real or imaginary—of things gone by? What a halo is round them! Their pleasures were exquisite, and their very miseries have in remembrance, a piquancy of flavour that is almost agreeable. I suppose the habit of most of us who have attained a certain, or rather uncertain age, is to revel in the past, to endure the present, and to let the future look after itself.
Now this is all well enough for the sentimentalist, or for the poet who, like Bulwer, can write at thirty “on the departure of youth.” But to the philosopher—that is, of course, to each member of “Pen and Pencil”—another and more useful tone of mind and method of comparison should not be absent. Is not the present what was the future to the past, and may we not by comparing the existing with what has been, as also with what was the aspiration of the past, throw some light, borrowed though it be, on what will be the present to our descendants? Mr. Pecksniff observes: “It is a poor heart that never rejoices.” Let us manifest our wealth—of imagination, shall I say?—by endeavouring to realize how, through the falsehood and wickedness of the past, we have arrived at our own lofty and noble eminence.
When we read, in the blood-stained pages of history, of nations and continents plunged into warfare of the most horrible and heartrending description, at the call of national glory or dynastic ambition, how can we sufficiently rejoice at the soft accents of peace and happiness which none would now venture to interrupt over the length and breadth of happy Europe?
The age of falsehood and party spirit may be said to have passed away. Our newspapers tell nothing but truth, and the only difference perceptible in their mild criticisms of friend or foe, is that they betray a generous tendency to do more than justice to their enemies.
If we cannot say that pauperism is extinct, yet we can honestly affirm that, if we cannot destroy the accursed thing itself, yet we can, and do so deal with paupers that the weakest, at least, soon cease to be a burden on the rates. Science and humanity have shaken hands, and the soft persuasions of chemical compounds are employed to assist down any unhappy girl who should be betrayed into aspirations towards the chimney-pot. We all know that gluttony is one of the greatest evils in the world, and which of our hearts could be hard enough not to glow with rapture at the benevolent rule of a London Union, mentioned in to-day’s paper, of never giving their inmates anything to tax their digestive forces between 5 P.M. and 8 A.M.
Again, when we read in our “Spectators” or other venerable records of the follies of fashion of 150 years ago, or indeed of any other epoch we like to recur to—of hoops and paint, and patches—how may we rejoice at the greater wisdom of our ladies in these days, in recognizing how beautifully they blend the tasteful with the useful! Their crinoline, how Grecian in its elegance; their chignons, how intellectual in appearance; their bonnets, how well calculated to protect from rain and sun; their trains, how cleanly; their boot-heels, how well calculated to produce by natural means what the barbarian Chinese seek by coarser methods—to deform the foot, and thus, by limiting their power of walking, to leave them more time for high intellectual culture.
Of the improvement in our social morals it is needless to speak, and indeed I must decline to do so, if only that in drawing a comparison I should have to shock the ears of “Pen and Pencil” with some allusions to things gone by. I will but casually refer to two salient characteristics of the enormities of bygone times—to novels and to the theatre. Compare but for a moment the wild and almost licentious writings of a Walter Scott, an Edgeworth, or an Austen with the pure and unexaggerated novels of the present halcyon time. And for our theatres, if it be possible to imagine anything more chaste and elevating than the existing drama—anything more stimulating to all that is purest, more repressive of all that is vulgar and low in our ballets or pantomimes—why, I very much mistake the realities that lie before us.
Finally, in the religion of the country—there where one looks for the summing up and climax as it were of all the incidental advances we have glanced at, how glorious is the spectacle! The fopperies of ecclesiastical upholstery banished from the land; the hardness and cruelty of dogmatic intolerance heard no more; a noble life everywhere more honoured than an orthodox belief.
Surely we have reached the Promised Land—it overflows with charity, with peace, plenty, and concord; and the only regret left to us is the fear that in so good a world none of us can entertain the hope to leave it better than we found it!
THINGS GONE BY.
Some years go by so comfortably calm,
So like their fellows, that they all seem one;
Each answering each, as verses in a psalm,
We miss them not—until the psalm is done:
Until, above the mild responsive strain,
An alter’d note, a louder passage rolls,
Whose diapason of delight or pain
Ends once for all the sameness of our souls:
Until some year, with passionate bold hand,
Breaks up at length our languid liberty,
And changes for us, in one brief command,
Both all that was, and all that was to be.
Thenceforth, the New Year never comes unheard;
No noise of mirth, no lulling winter’s snow
Can hush the footsteps which are bringing word
Of things that make us other than we know.
Thenceforth, we differ from our former selves;
We have an insight new, a sharper sense
Of being; how unlike those thoughtless elves
Who wait no end, and watch no providence!
We watch, we wait, with not a star in view:
Content, if haply whilst we dwell alone
The memory of something live and true
Can keep our hearts from freezing into stone.
NO;
OR, THE LITTLE GOOSE-GIRL.A Tale Of The First Of May, 2099.
The little Goose-girl came singing
Along the fields, “Sweet May, oh! the long sweet day.”
That was her song,
Bringing about her, floating about
In and out through the long fair tresses
Of her hair; oh! a thousand thousand idlenesses,
Spreading away on May’s breath everywhere
“Idleness, sweet idleness.”
But this was a time,
Two thousand and ninety-nine,
When, singing of idleness even in Spring,
Or drinking wind-wine,
Or looking up into the blue heaven
Was counted a crime.
A time, harsh, not sublime,
One terrible sort of school-
Hour all the year through,
When everyone had to do something, and do it by rule.
Why, even the babies could calculate
Two and two at the least, mentally, without a slate,
Each calling itself an aggregate
Of molecules—
It was always school—schools,
All over the world as far as the sky could cover
It—dry land and sea.
High Priests said,
“Let matter be Z,
Thoroughly calculated and tried
To work our problems with, before all eyes—
Anything beside that might prove a dangerous guide:
X’s and Y’s,
Unknown quantities,
We hesitate not, at once to designate
Fit only, now and for ever to be laid aside.”
So, you see
Everything was made as plain as could be,
Not the ghost of a doubt even left to roam about free.
Everybody’s concern
Being just to learn, learn, learn,
In one way—but only in one way.
Where then did the little Goose-girl come from that day?
I don’t know. Though
Isn’t there hard by
A place, tender and sunny,
One can feel slid between
Our seen and unseen,
And whose shadows we trace on the Earth’s face
Now and then dimly?—Well, she
Was as ignorant as she could ignorant be.
The world wasn’t school to her
Who came singing
“Sweet Idleness, sweet Idleness” up to the very feet
Of the Professors’ chairs,
And of the thousand thousand pupils sitting round upon theirs;
Who, up all sprang,
At the sound of the words she sang
With “No, no, no, no, no,
There are no sweets in May,
None in the weary day;
What foolish thing is this, singing of idleness in spring?”
“Oh! sunny spring,”
Still sang the little Goose-girl. Wondering
As she was passing—
And suddenly stay’d for a moment basking
In the broad light, with wide eyes asking
What “nay” could mean to the soft warm day.
And as she stay’d
There stray’d out from her
May breaths, wandering all the school over.
But now, the hard eyes move her
And her lips quiver
As the sweet notes shiver
Between them and die.
So her singing ceases, she
Looking up, crying, “Why is my May not sweet?
Is the wide sky fair?
Are the free winds fleet?
Are the feet of the Spring not rare
That tread flowers out of the soil?
Oh! long hours, not for toil,
But for wondering and singing.”
“No, no, no, no,”
These reply,
“Silly fancies of flowers and skies,
All these things we know.
There is nothing to wonder at, sing,
Love, or fear—
Is not everything simple, and clear,
And common, and near us, and weary?
So, pass by idle dreaming—
And you, if you would like to know
Being from seeming,
Come into the schools and study.”
“Still to sing sometimes when I have the will,
And be idle and ponder,”
Said the Goose-girl, “and look up to heaven and wonder?”
“What! Squander Truth’s time
In dreams of the unknown sublime—
No—” Then “Ignorant always,” said she,
“I must be,”
And went on her way. “Sweet May, sad May”—
Hanging her head—
Till, “The mills of the gods grind slowly,” she said,
“But they grind exceeding small,
Let be, I will sit by the mills of the gods, and watch the slow atoms fall.”
So, patient and still, through long patient hours
As she laid her heart low in the hearts of the flowers,
Through clouds and through shine,
With smiles and with tears,
Through long hours, through sweet years;
Oh! years—for a hundred years was one
School-hour in two thousand and ninety-nine.
And see!
Who are these that come creeping out from the schools?
—Long ago, when idlenesses
Out of her tresses, stray’d the school over,
Some slept of the learners, some played.
These crept out to wonder and sing,
And look for her yonder,
Away up the hills,
Amongst the gods’ mills.
And now
“Is it this way?” they say,
Bowing low,
“Oh! wise, by the heaven in thine eyes
Teach—we will learn from thee—
Is it no, is it yes,
Labour or Idleness?”
She,
Answering meekly: “This—
Neither no, nor yes,
But ‘come into God and see.’”
Oh! the deeps we can feel; oh! the heights we must climb.
Oh! slow gentle hours of the golden time—
Here, the end of my rhyme.
May, 1869.
EXILE.
Night falls in the convict prison,—
The eve of a summer day;
Through the heated cells and galleries,
The cooler nightwinds play.
And slumber on folded pinions
With oblivion brought relief;
Stilling the weary tossings,—
Smoothing the brow of grief.
Through a dungeon’s narrow grating
The slanting moonlight fell
Down by a careworn prisoner,
Asleep in his lonely cell.
The hand which lay so nerveless
Had grasp’d a sword ere now,
And the lips now parch’d with fever
Had utter’d a patriot’s vow.
He stirr’d and the silence was broken,
By the clanking of a chain,
He sigh’d, but the sigh no longer,
Show’d the spirit’s restless pain.
For to him the dark walls faded,
And the prisoner stood once more
Beneath the vine-wreath’d trellis,
Beside his loved home’s door.
And memory drew the faces
So dear in earlier days,
Of the sisters who were with him
Joining in childish plays,
And the mother whose lips first murmured
The prayer which had made him brave,
“Let his fate be what Thou wiliest,
But not, oh! not a slave.”
And the friends whose blood beat quickly
At the wrongs of their native land
And the vow they had vowed together,
Grasping each other’s hand.
He dreamt of the first resistance,
Of the one who basely fled;
And the guard’s o’erwhelming numbers
And the hopes of life all dead.
And then of the weary waiting,
An exile on foreign ground;
With stranger voices near him,
And unknown faces round.
Oh! ships o’er the gladsome waters,
What news do you bring to-day?
What tidings of home and kindred
To the exile far away?
And he dreamt of the glad returning
To the well-loved native shore;
When news had come—All are ready
To dare the fight once more.
Of the hearts that throbbed exulting,
With hope of the coming strife,
Of the sigh which fell unheeded
To the thought of child and wife.
And he dreamt of the day of contest,
Of whistling shot and shell,
When he bore his country’s banner,
And had borne it high and well.
“Rally for Freedom! Forward!
Stand! for our cause is Right;
Sooner be slain than defeated,
Better is death than flight.”
Ah! happy the first who perished,
Who saw not the turning day,
And the fallen flag, and the broken line,
And the rout without hope or stay!
And the prisoner groaned in his slumbers,
But now, with a sudden glow,
The glorious moonlight’s splendour
Poured full on his humid brow.
On its rays there floated to him
The friends of his early youth,
Who had borne their steadfast witness
In the holy cause of Truth.
“Welcome,” they said, “we await thee;
Come, and receive thy meed,
The crown of those who flinched not
In our country’s greatest need.”
Was it a dream, or delusion?
Or vision? Who shall say?
Its spell consoled the hours
Of many a weary day.
And months went slowly over,
And the winter’s icy breath
Blew chill through an empty dungeon:
The convict was freed—by Death.
EXILE.
In exile, hopeless of relief,
I pine, a hapless sailor,
And this is how I came to grief,
Upon an Arctic whaler.
My exile is no land of palms,
Of tropic groves and spices,
But placed amid the savage charms
Of polar snows and ices.
It was a sad funereal coast,
The billows moaned a dirge;
The coast itself was lined with bays,
The rocks were cloth’d with surge.
And here by cruel fogs and fates
Our ship was cast away—
Where Davis found himself in straits,
And Baffin turn’d to bay.
And from my chilly watch aloft
I saw the icebergs sailing,
Where I sat weeping very oft,
While all the crew were whaling.
For one and all, both great and small,
From veteran to lubber,
From captain down to cabin boy,
Were used to whale and blubber.
Our ship misled by ill advice—
Our skipper, half seas over,
Upon this continent of ice
Incontinently drove her.
While I alone to land did drive,
Among the spars and splinters,
And since have kept myself alive,
Through two long Arctic winters.
It was a land most desolate,
Where ice, and frost, and fog,
Too truly did prognosticate,
An utter want of prog.
Another would have reeved a rope,
And made himself a necklace;
My wreck bereaved me of my hope,
But did not leave me reckless.
And since, on oil and fat I’ve kept
My freezing blood in motion.
(I think the “fatness” of the land
Transcends the land of Goshen.)
In vain, gaunt hunger to beguile,
I try each strange device;
Alas! my ribs grow thin the while,
Amid the thick-ribb’d ice.
In vain I pour the midnight oil,
As eating cares increase;
And make the study of my nights
A history of Greece.
Monarch of all that I survey,
By right divine appointed;
(If lubrication in and out
Can make a Lord’s anointed).
Though lord of both the fowl and brute
My schemes to catch them work ill,
And three she-walrii constitute
My social Arctic circle;
Three, did I say? there are but two,
For she I chiefly fancied
Has been my stay the winter through,
And now is turning rancid.
The cruel frost has nipped me some;
My mournful glances linger
Upon a solitary thumb,
And half a middle finger.
In toto I have lost my toes,
Down to the latest joint:
And there is little of my nose
Above the freezing point.
Upon this floe of ice my tears
Are freezing as they flow;
I lie between two sheets of ice,
Upon a bed of snow.
I have a hybernating feel,
And with the Bear and Dormouse,
Shall take it out in sleep until
Something turns up to warm us:
Until some Gulf-Stream vagaries
Or astronomic cycles,
Shall bring to these raw latitudes
The climate of St. Michael’s.
Or else some cataclysm rude
With polar laws shall play tricks,
And Nature in a melting mood
Dissolve my icy matrix.
Maybe, a hundred centuries hence,
Pr’aps thousands (say the latter),
Amid the war of elements
And even the wreck of matter,
When in the crush of worlds, our own
Gets squeezed into a hexagon,
The natives of this frozen zone
May see me on my legs again.
THE LITTLE FAIRY.
Tradition.
From Béranger.
Once on a time, my children dear,
A Fairy, called Urgande, lived here,
Who though but as my finger tall,
Was just as good as she was small;
For of her wand one touch, they say,
Could perfect happiness convey.
O dear Urgande! O good Urgande!
Do tell us where you’ve hid your wand!
Eight butterflies, in harness, drew
Her tiny car of sapphire blue,
In which, as o’er the land she went,
Her smile to earth fresh vigour lent;
The grape grew sweeter on the vine,
More golden did the cornfield shine.
O dear Urgande! O good Urgande!
Do tell us where you’ve hid your wand!
The King a godson was of hers,
And so she chose his Ministers—
Just men who held the laws in sight,
And whose accounts could face the light.
The crook as shepherds did they keep
To scare the wolves and not the sheep.
O dear Urgande! O good Urgande!
Do tell us where you’ve hid your wand!
To show what love she tow’rds him bore,
She touched the crown her godson wore—
A happy people met his eye,
Who for his sake would freely die;
Did foreign foes the realm invade
Not long they lived, or short they stayed.
O dear Urgande! O good Urgande!
Do tell us where you’ve hid your wand!
The judges of this King so good
Decided always as they should:
Not once throughout that pleasant reign
Did Innocence unheard complain,
Or guilt repentant vainly pray
For guidance in the better way.
O dear Urgande! O good Urgande!
Do tell us where you’ve hid your wand!
Alas! my dear, I must allow
There’s no Urgande on earth just now.
America is sore be-mobbed;
Poor Asia’s conquered, crushed, and robbed;
And though at home, of course, we find
Our rulers all that’s nice and kind—
Still—dear Urgande! O good Urgande!
Do tell us where you’ve hid your wand!