THY WILL BE DONE
I.
My soul a little kingdom is,
Where God's most holy will
Shall reign in undivided sway,
Potent and grand and still.
I'll kneel before the crystal throne,
And kiss the golden rod;
O peace unspeakable, to bow
Before the will of God!
What though my weary feet should fail.
My tongue refuse to praise,
God knows my soul will steadfastly
Still follow in his ways.
II.
The time has come, my soul, the time has come
To prove the depth of thy oft-vaunted love;
A sullen gloom hangs round us like a fog,
And lowering clouds are drooping from above.
Would it were light, or dark, not this grey gloom;
Would that the terror of some sudden crash
Might break this stifling, dumb monotony!
O for some deafening peal or blinding flash!
Weary and old and sick, like ancient Job,
I crouch in haggard woe and scan the past,
Or drag the leaden moments at my heels,
Mocking wise fools who say that life runs fast.
[{779}]
Nothing to conquer now--no call for strength;
Naught to contend with--only to wait and bear,
And see my withering powers and blighted gifts--
No room to act--nothing to do or dare:
Speak now, my soul, if thou hast aught to say
If thou seest light or any hope of day.
III.
Fret not this holy stillness with thy cries--
Patience, perturbed clay!
Lest thou should'st drown the voice of the All-wise
With clamorous dismay.
Thinkest thou that clouds and mists are less God's work,
Than sun or moon or stars?
His will is good, whether it bind the free
Or sunder prison bars.
His hand has measured out each feather's weight
Of this most grievous load;
He bore the cross we bear, his heart, like ours,
Once in life's furnace glowed.
We shall in heaven sing a psalm of joy
For every earth-wrung moan;
One little hour more, the work well done.
And we are all God's own.
CONTRASTS
There is no sound of anguish in the air,
Bees hum, birds sing, the breeze is balmy-sweet
And from the blooming hawthorn overhead
A rosy shower droppeth at my feet.
No matter! God be praised--some untried heart,
Sweet with the dewy freshness of life's dawn,
Is gathering a glad presage of success
From this bright, pitiless, resplendent morn.
[From the Irish Industrial Magazine.]
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS OF OUR ANCESTORS.
BY M. HAVERTY, ESQ.
ARTS OF CONSTRUCTION.
In considering the building arts, as practised by the inhabitants of this country in past ages, we must necessarily divide the subject according to epochs. The ethnologist would of course begin with his favorite scientific classification of the Stone, the Bronze and the Iron periods; but this division is, to say the least of it, a very arbitrary, very indefinite, and very doubtful one. It leaves much too wide a scope for imagination, and offers no satisfactory explanation of social development; and the following obvious and natural order of periods, in the present instance, will answer our purpose, namely:
1. The Pre-Christian period, extending from some indefinite epoch of the pre-historic ages, down to the establishment of Christianity in Ireland, in the fifth century; 2. The early Christian period, extending from the last-mentioned epoch to the commencement of the Danish wars, in the beginning of the ninth century; 3. The period of obscurity and barbarism into which this country was plunged by those fierce and long-protracted wars, and from which it began to emerge in the reign of Brian, and after the battle of Clontarf, in 1014; 4. The period which followed that just mentioned, and which extends beyond the Anglo-Norman invasion until the native Irish ceased to act as a distinct people; and, [sic--no 5.] 6. The period which was inaugurated by the aforesaid Anglo-Norman epoch, and descended to modern times, embracing the ages, first of noble Gothic abbeys, and feudal keeps of Norman barons, and walled towns; and then of the fortified bawns and strong solitary towers of new proprietors, in the Tudor, Stuart, and Williamite times.
In the first of these periods there was no stone and mortar masonry known in Ireland, nor was there any knowledge of the arch. Of cyclopean masonry--masonry in which huge stones were frequently employed, but never any cement--some stupendous and wonderful examples belonging to this first period still remain; but there was no cemented work. This we may take as absolutely certain, notwithstanding the notions of some modern antiquaries about the supposed pre-Christian origin of the round towers. This pagan theory of the round towers is a pure creation of what we may call the conjectural school of Irish antiquaries. The ancient Irish never dreamt of it. It was suggested at a time when scarcely anything was known of the original native source of Irish history; and it has seldom been advocated except by those who are either still unacquainted with these sources of our history, or else who are carried away by false ideas of early Irish civilization, and visionary theories of ancient Irish fire-worship and Orientalism; for all which there is not the slightest foundation in the actual history of the country. It is right that this should be distinctly understood: without entering into lengthened arguments on the subject, which would be out of place here, it ought to be quite sufficient for any rational person to know, that the character of all the remains of undoubted pagan buildings in Ireland is utterly inconsistent with the [{781}] supposition that the same people who built them also built the round towers; and that such knowledge as we actually possess of the manners and customs of the pagan Irish shows the absurdity of the notion that the round towers were built by them. The passages of ancient Irish writings which may be adduced to show that the round towers were built by Christians are extremely numerous, while there is not one single iota of evidence in the written monuments of Irish history, either printed or MS., for their pagan origin--nothing, in fact, but wild, unsupported conjecture and imagination. And such being the case, and all the writings and researches of such distinguished Irish historical scholars as Petrie, O'Donovan, and O'Curry, who have passed away, and of Wilde and Todd, and Graves and Reeves, and Ferguson, etc., tending to overturn the visionary theories of Irish antiquities, of which the round tower phantasy has been the most noted, it is time to abandon this last remnant of a false and exploded system.
What, then, are the remains which we have of the buildings or structures of the ancient Irish belonging to the first, or pagan, period? They are various, and exceedingly numerous. In the first place, there are the raths, or earthen forts, with which the whole face of the country is still absolutely dotted. These raths were the dwelling-places of the Irish, not only indeed, in pagan times, but much more recently. They were originally rather steep earthworks, surrounded by a ditch, and topped by a strong paling or stockade; sometimes there was a double or treble line of intrenchment, and within the inner fence the family or families of the occupants dwelt in timber or hurdle houses, of which, from the perishable nature of the materials, no traces of course remain. The cattle, too, were driven for safety within the inclosure, when it was known that an enemy was abroad; and it is probable that the position of a great many of the raths on a sloping surface was selected for purposes of drainage, seeing that the cattle were so frequently to be inclosed. It is also worthy of note, that these earthen forts were always polygonal, generally octagonal, and we have never seen one of them actually round; although it would have been much easier to describe the plain circle than the regular polygonal figure adopted.
When the inclosures were constructed of stone; they were called cahirs or cashels. It has been stated by antiquaries that the stone forts were built by the early Irish colonists, called Firbolgs, and the earthen forts by the subsequent colony of Tuath de Danaans; but it is probable that each colony built their strongholds of the materials which they found most convenient. In the rich plains of Meath, where there are very few surface stones that could have been employed for the purpose, we find none but earthen forts; and in the Isles of Arran, where there is little indeed besides solid rock, the Firbolgs necessarily constructed their famous duns of stone. These vast Firbolg duns of Arran must have been impregnable in those days, if defended by sufficient garrison; and their size and number in a place so small and barren show that almost the whole remnant of the race must have been compelled by hard necessity to seek shelter there against their pressing foes. It would also appear that the abundant supply of stone induced the occupants of those Arran forts to substitute stone houses in their interior for the habitations of timber and wattles used elsewhere; as we here find numerous remains of the small beehive houses, called cloghanes, formed by the overlapping of flat stones, laid horizontally, until they meet at top, thus roofing in the house without an arch. Both cloghanes and forts are built, of course, without cement; and no one could for a moment imagine that the Round Tower, of which a portion still [{782}] remains in the largest island, could possibly have been the work of the same masons.
The style of building is the same in the Duns of Aran; in Staig Fort, in Kerry; in the Greenan of Aileach, in Donegal; and in general in any of the primitive cahirs or cashels, wherever they exist in Ireland; nor is there any material difference between these and the similar structures to be found in Wales--such as the Castell-Caeron over Dolbenmaen, in Caernarvonshire.
The same Irish word, Saor, (pronounced Seer,) originally signified both a carpenter and a mason; and in an Irish poem, at least eight hundred and fifty years old, we have a list of the ancient builders, who erected the principal strongholds of pagan times in Ireland: such as--"Casruba, the high-priced cashel-builder, who employed quick axes to smoothen stones;" and "Rigriu and Garvon, son of Ugarv, the cashel-builders of Aileach," and "Troiglethan, who sculptured images, and was the rath-builder of the Hill of Tara;" while every one familiar with the native Irish traditions has heard the name of Grubban-Saor, to whose skill half the ancient castles of Ireland were, without any reference to chronology, supposed to owe their strength.
An Irish antiquary of the seventeenth century, who enjoyed the friendship of Sir James Ware, writes as if he believed that the ancient pagan Irish understood the use of cement, although, as he confesses, no vestige of stone and mortar work by them remained in his day. But his mode of arguing, as it will be perceived, is very inconclusive. After enumerating several of the ancient raths and cashels of Ireland, he writes: "We have evidence of their having been built like the edifices of other kingdoms of the times in which they were built; and why should they not? for there came no colony into Erin but from the eastern world, as from Spain, etc.; and it would be strange if such a deficiency of intellect should mark the parties who came into Ireland, as that they should not have the sense to form their residences and dwellings after the manner of the countries from which they went forth, or through which they travelled." [See Introduction to Dudley Mac Firbis's great "Book of Genealogies," translated in "O'Curry's Lectures," pp. 222, etc.] It is quite certain that the early colonizers of Ireland, to whom Mac Firbis thus alludes, were a portion of that great Celtic wave of population which passed from East to West over Europe, leaving the same earthern mounds and cyclopean stone structures behind as monuments wherever they went; but it is equally certain, that if these ancient colonies visited Assyria, and Egypt, and Greece in their peregrinations, as Mac Firbis believed they did, they did not carry with them Assyrian, or Egyptian, or Grecian masonry or architecture into Ireland. The raths and cashels which they constructed were exceedingly simple in their character, and in very few indeed of the former is there the slightest grace of stonework to be discovered. Caves were very often formed under the raths; and Mac Firbis states that under the rath of Bally O Dowda, in Tireragh, he himself had seen "nine smooth stone cellars," and that its walls were still of the height of "a good cow-keep." Nor were the contents of the ancient Irish dwellings less simple than the buildings themselves; for we find by the Brehon Laws that "the Seven valuables of the house of a chieftain were--a caldron, vat, goblet, mug, reins, horse-bridle, and pin;" the first-mentioned articles indicating clearly the usages of hospitality, which always formed the predominating institution of the Irish. The same book of Brehon Laws refers to "a house with four doors, and a stream through the centre, to be provided for the sick"--such, apparently, being the ideas at that time of what a hospital should be.
It is hard to say when the popular notion originated which attributes the ancient raths and mounds to the Danes. It is quite dear that Mac Firbis knew very well they were not Danish, though the idea must have prevailed when he wrote, (A.D. 1650;) for his contemporary, Lord Castlehaven, speaks of withdrawing his troops, during the civil war of 1645, within one of the "Danish forts," which were so numerous in the country; and such was the fashion of attributing all our antiquities to a people who had impressed the memory of the nation with such terrible and indelible traditions of themselves, that even Archdeacon Lynch, the author of "Cambrensis Eversus," supposes the Danes to have been the builders of the round towers. Dr. Molyneux, who wrote toward the close of the same century, treats us to a whole book about "the Danish Forts and Mounds;" but we know perfectly well that the Danes of Ireland resided only in the seaport towns and their vicinities, and had no dwellings, and consequently no raths or mounds in the interior of the country.
Besides the earthen and stone forts, which, it must be remembered, were inhabited in the early Christian as well as in the pagan times, and down to a period which it is impossible now to define, we have several remains of the early Irish habitations, called cranogues. These were small stockaded and generally artificial islands, in the smaller lakes, and were only accessible by means of boats, ancient specimens of which, hewn out of a single tree, have been found in the vicinity of the cranogues in recent times. Some of these cranogues are known to have been occupied in comparatively modern times; and the strong timber stakes by which they were generally surrounded are, in a few instances, still found singularly fresh, and with indications of having been connected by a strong framework.
Of the state of the building arts in Ireland during the early Christian period we are enabled to form a tolerably accurate idea, both by the large number of remains still existing, and by the notices on the subject which we find in historical documents. Many of the very earliest Christian edifices devoted to religion in Ireland were built of stone; but it is clear, nevertheless, that the national fashion was to construct them of timber; and this fashion the Irish had in common with the Britons, or, we should rather say, with the Celtic nations generally. Strabo says the houses of the Gauls were constructed of poles and wattle work; and we learn from Bede, that among the Britons building with stone was regarded as a characteristic Roman practice. We know that both in Ireland and Britain there was a national prejudice in favor of the custom of employing timber to construct their churches. The first three churches erected in Ireland--those, namely, constructed by St. Palladius in his unsuccessful mission immediately before St Patrick--were of oak. Long after this time, in the sixth century, St. Columba lived in a wooden cell in the island of Hy, as his biographer, St. Adamnan, relates; and the use of timber for their religious edifices was much in favor with the Columbian monks wherever they settled. So late as the year 1142, when St. Malachy was building the church of the famous Cistercian Abbey of Mellifont, in Louth, he received some opposition from one of the local magnates, because he had undertaken to erect it in an expensive and solid manner of stone; the argument of this person being, that "they were Scots, not Frenchmen," and that a wooden oratory in the old Irish fashion would have sufficed.
It is a curious circumstance connected with this Abbey of Mellifont, that it is the only Irish edifice of a date older than the Anglo-Norman period in the ruins of which Dr. Petrie discovered any bricks to have been used; and we know that it was erected by monks whom St. Malachy had sent to study in the monastery of St. Bernard, in France; whence the allusion to [{784}] Frenchmen made by the Irishman who had objected to the style of the building. Still it is plain that the ecclesiastical edifices of stone were very numerous in the country at that very time; for a few years after St. Gelasius, the Archbishop of Armagh, caused a limekiln of vast dimensions to be constructed, in order, as the annalists say, to make lime for the repairs of the churches of Armagh which had been allowed to fall into decay.
The primitive wooden churches were, at least in some instances, constructed of planed boards, and were thatched with reeds, the walls being also frequently protected by a covering of reeds, for which, in later times, a sheeting of lead was sometimes substituted. This use of lead sheeting became very general in England; but we may presume that it was employed in comparatively few cases in Ireland. Sometimes, instead of boards or hewn timber, wattles were employed, and these were plastered with mud, the wattles being formed of strong twigs interlaced. We shall presently see that the use of wattles for building purposes was in vogue in Ireland up to comparatively modern times. It is stated in the life of St. Patrick, that when that apostle visited Tyrawley, in the county of Sligo, finding that timber was not abundant, he erected a church of mud--so ancient is the custom of employing that material for building in Ireland--a material, however, which never could be rendered as suitable for the purpose in our moist climate, as it is found to be in some of the southern portions of Europe.
From the very introduction of Christianity, we repeat, stone and mortar were frequently employed for the building of churches in Ireland. A building of this description was always called in Irish Damhliag, a word literally signifying "stone church." This term is still preserved in the name of Duleek in the county of Meath, where the old stone church so called, and which is supposed, on good authority, to have been the very first such edifice erected in Ireland, is still in good preservation; it was built by St. Kienan, a disciple of St. Patrick, who died in 490; and its age is thus established beyond any doubt. The stone building, or Damhliag, as Dr. Petrie has remarked, is always latinized by the old Irish writers templum, ecclesia, or basilica; while the wooden building is simply called oratorium.
The ancient Irish churches are almost invariably small, seldom exceeding 80 feet in length, and not usually being more than 60 feet. The great church or cathedral of Armagh was originally 140 feet long; but this was almost a solitary exception. The smaller churches are simple oblong quadrangles, while in the larger ones there is a second and smaller quadrangle at the east end, which was the chancel or sanctuary, and which is separated from the nave by a large semicircular arch. The entrance door was always originally in the west end, and square-headed, the top lintel being generally formed of a single very large flat stone; but in every instance the square-headed western doorway was in process of time built up, and another doorway, in the pointed style, opened in the south wall, near its western extremity. The windows are extremely small, and very few, generally not more than three, two of which are in the sanctuary, and all being in the south wall; they are frequently triangular-headed, formed by two flat stones leaning against each other; and it is probable that in many cases they were never glazed. The sides of the doorways and windows are inclined, in the manner of the cyclopean buildings--a style of architecture with which they have more than one point in common; for enormous stones are frequently used, the single stone being made to form both faces of the wall. Polygonal stones are employed, without any attempt to build in courses; and even flat stones are often placed at angles, when, with the aid of very little skill, they might have [{785}] been placed horizontally; while another singular feature often to be observed in the oldest Irish stone churches is, that the side walls and ends are built up independently, and not bound together at the corners by any interlapping stones. All these peculiarities are to be found, in a very marked degree, in the extremely curious specimens of seventh and eighth century buildings in the South Islands of Arran; and, with the exception of some Christian cloghanes, and some stone-roofed oratories like those near Dingle, all these early Christian edifices have been built with lime cement.
From the rudeness of the masonry in the buildings of the early Christian period, a very curious argument has been adduced in favor of the Pagan origin of the Round Towers. Some persons, in fact, do not hesitate to argue that, as the Round Towers frequently exhibit a better style of masonry than the ruined churches in their neighborhood, they must have been erected by some earlier race of builders, thus adopting the very opposite to the correct and natural conclusion which the premises would suggest. Such persons must have a very misty idea of Irish history; they do not appear to be aware that there is no country in Europe, except Greece and Rome, of which the ancient history can boast of such a clear and consecutive series of written and traditional annals as that of Ireland. This is the acknowledged opinion of the most learned investigators. There is, then, no room whatever for any such conjectural race or epoch as that which the theory in question would suppose in Irish history; there is no room for such wild hypotheses as may be framed, for instance, to account for the remains of extinct civilized races in the interior of North America. Any one who has the singularly distinct chain of ancient Irish chronicles present to his mind must be aware of this fact, and must know perfectly well that there was no mysterious unknown race in Ireland before the introduction of Christianity who could have built the round towers--even if it were probable that such a race would have built these, and left no other fragment of stone and mortar work in the land! As to the disparity sometimes to be observed in the masonry of the towers and the ancient churches beside them, it can be explained without any such absurd hypothesis. It is clear from the mouldings of the windows, and other architectural details, and even from the statements of our annalists, that some of the Round Towers are not older than the eleventh or twelfth century, and consequently their masonry might well be superior to that of churches built some four or five hundred years before them. But, even when the builders were contemporary, they were not such dull craftsmen as not to have understood perfectly well that a more careful style of workmanship was required in an edifice which they should carry to a height of 120 or 130 feet than in one of which the walls would not exceed 10 or 14 feet in elevation. In fact, a little consideration must show any enlightened man that the theory to which we have referred is utterly untenable.
Mr. Parker, a high authority on questions of architectural antiquity, has, in his valuable series of papers on the subject in the "Gentleman's Magazine," thrown considerable light on Irish mediaeval architecture. One point, of which he has been decidedly the first observer, is, that all the details of an ancient building in Ireland seldom or never belong to the period at which the building was, according to record, erected. This is an extremely carious fact; and there can be no doubt of Mr. Parker's accuracy on the point; but it appears to us that he invariably finds his remark verified in castles and abbeys of the Anglo-Norman period in Ireland. To what, then, is the peculiarity to be attributed? Could the architects have been Irish, and could they have adopted their principles from the study of older edifices [{786}] in England? On this point we are not aware that he comes to any conclusion; but, in describing the interesting details of Cormac's Chapel, on the Rock of Cashel--one of the most valuable remains of mediaeval architecture in the empire, and which was built some fifty years before the Anglo-Norman invasion--he says, "It is neither earlier nor later in style than buildings of the same date in England; and with the exception of a few particulars, agrees in detail with them." From this we may conclude, that before the arrival of the Anglo-Normans the Irish architects were fully up to the contemporary state of their art, though subsequently the Anglo-Irish fell into the anachronisms which Mr. Parker so frequently points out.
When Henry II. resolved on spending the Christmas of 1171 in Dublin, there was no building in that old capital of the Ostmen sufficiently spacious to accommodate his court; and a pavilion was accordingly constructed for the purpose of plastered wattles, in the Irish fashion, on a site at the south side of the present Dame street This mode of constructing houses must have been very convenient in times when the face of a country was liable every other year to be devastated by war, and when it would have been folly to erect a habitation intended to be permanent. The destruction of all the dwellings in a territory at that time, was not quite so ruinous a catastrophe as it might seem to us, especially as it was a very usual thing to have the granaries under ground.
The employment of wattles for one purpose or other, in the construction of buildings, appears to have been very long retained in Ireland; and they seem to have been constantly used by the masons as centering in the building of arches, as may be seen from an examination of any of the ruined abbeys or castles throughout the country, where the impression of the interwoven twigs will always be found in the mortar of the vaulted roofs and arches. Mr. Parker appears to have been particularly struck by this circumstance, which, however, is familiar to every Irish antiquary; but he tells us that he has found the same thing in a few instances in England.
A French gentleman, who travelled through Ireland in 1644, has left us a curious account of the mode of constructing their habitations employed at that time by the rural population. He writes: "The towns are built in the English fashion, but the houses in the country are in this manner: two stakes are fixed in the ground, across which is a transverse pole, to support two rows of rafters on the two sides, which are covered with leaves and straw. The cabins are of another fashion. There are four walls the height of a man, supporting rafters, over which they thatch with straw and leaves; they are without chimneys, and make the fire in the middle of the hut, which greatly incommodes those who are not fond of smoke."
The writer goes on to describe the fortified domiciles of the gentry. He says: "The castles or houses of the nobility consist of four walls extremely high, thatched with straw; but, to tell the truth, they are nothing but square towers without windows, or, at least, having such small apertures as to give no more light than there is in a prison; they have little furniture, and cover their room with rushes, of which they make their beds in summer, and of straw in winter; they put the rushes a foot deep on their floors, and on their windows, and many of them ornament the ceilings with branches." (The Tour of M. De la Boullaye le Gouz.)
This description is applicable to those numerous, solitary, and gloomy buildings called castles, the ruins of which are so conspicuous in every part of the country, and a considerable number of which were erected by the Undertakers, in the reign of James I.; while it must be confessed that the mode of constructing the hovels of the peasantry, as described in the preceding extract, has not undergone much improvement, up to the present day, in many parts of Ireland.
Translated from the Spanish.
PERICO THE SAD; OR, THE ALVAREDA FAMILY.
CHAPTER XIII.
A tempestuous night covered the sky with flying clouds, which were rushing further on to discharge their torrents. Sometimes they separated in their flight, and the moon appeared between them, mild and tranquil, like a herald of concord and peace in the midst of the strife.
In the short intervals, during which this placid light illumined earth and heaven, a pale and emaciated man might have been seen making his way along a solitary road. The uncertainty of his manner, his apprehensive eyes, and the agitation of his face, would have shown clearly that he was a fugitive.
A fugitive indeed! for he fled from inhabited places; fled from his fellow-men; fled from human justice; fled from himself and from his own conscience. This man was an assassin, and no one who had seen him fleeing, as the clouds above were fleeing before the invisible force which pursued them, would have recognized the honorable man, the obedient son, the loving husband and devoted father of a few days since, in this miserable being, now fallen under the irremissible sentence of the law of expiation.
Yes, this man was Perico, not seeking a peace now and for ever lost, but fleeing from the present and in dread of the future.
He had passed days of despair and nights of horror in the most solitary places, sustaining himself on acorns and roots; shrinking from the light of day, which accused, and from the eyes of men, that condemned him. But no darkness could hide the images that were always before him, no silence awe their clamors. His unhappy sister; his disconsolate mother; the bereaved old man, his father's friend, haunted his vision; the reprobation of his honorable race oppressed his soul; and more appalling than all these, the solemn, mournful, and warning note of the passing bell, which he had heard calling to Heaven for mercy upon his victim, sounded continually in his ears. In vain pride insinuated, through its most seductive organ, worldly honor, that he had, and that not to vindicate himself would have been a reproach; that the injuries were greater than the reprisal.
A voice which the cries of passion had silenced, but which became more distinct and more severe in proportion as they, like all that is human, sank and failed--the eternal voice of conscience, said to him, "O that thou hadst never done it!"
There came, borne upon the wind, an extraordinary sound, now hoarser, now failing and fainter, as the gusts were more or less powerful. What could it be? Everything terrifies the guilty soul. Was it the roar of the wind, the pipe of an organ, or a voice of lamentation? The nearer Perico approached it, the more inexplicable it seemed. The road the unhappy man was following led toward the point from whence the sound proceeded. He reaches it, and his terror is at his height when, unable to distinguish anything--for a black cloud has covered the moon--he hears directly above his bead the portentous wail, so sad, so vague, so awful!
At this moment the clouds are broken, and over all the moonlight falls, clear and silvery, like a mantle of transparent snow. Every object comes out of the mystery of shadows. He sees reija asleep in its valley like a white bird in its nest. He lifts his eyes to discover the cause of the sound. O horror! Upon five posts he sees five human heads! From these proceed the doleful lamentation, a warning from the dead to the living. [Footnote 185]
[Footnote 185: Various witnesses have testified to this frightful phenomenon, which is naturally explained, the sound being caused by the wind passing through the throat, month, and ears of heads placed as located above.]
Perico starts back aghast, and perceives, for the first time, that he is not alone. A man is standing near one of the posts. He is tall and vigorous, and his bearing is manly and erect. He is dressed richly after the manner of contrabandists. His bronzed face is hard, bold, and calm. He holds his hat in his hand, inclining uncovered before these posts of ignominy a head which never was uncovered in human respect; for it is that of an outlaw, of a man who has broken all ties with society, and respects nothing in the world. But this man, although impious, believes in God, and although criminal, is a Christian, and is praying.
When from an energetic and indomitable nature, emancipated from all restrain, there issue a few drops of adoration, as water oozes from a rock, what do you call it unbelievers? Is it superstitious fear? To this man fear is a word without a meaning. Is it hypocrisy? Only the heads of five dead men witness it. Is it moral weakness? He has strength of soul unknown in society, where all lean upon something; he stands alone. Is it a remembrance of infancy, a tribute to the mother who taught him to pray?
There exists no such memory for the abandoned orphan, who grew up among the savage bulls he guarded.
What is it then that bends his neck and detains him to pray in the presence of the dead?
After some moments the man concluded his prayer, replaced his hat, and turning to Perico said,
"Where are you going, sir?"
Perico neither wished nor was able to answer. A vertigo had seized him.
"Where are you going, I say?" again asked the unknown.
Perico remained silent.
"Are you dumb?" proceeded the questioner, "or is it because you do not choose to answer? If it is the last," he added, pointing to his gun, "here is a mouth which obtains replies when mine fails."
Perico's situation rendered him too desperate for reflection, and the brand of cowardice which had been stamped upon his forehead, still burned like a recent mark of the ignominious iron. He therefore answered instantly, seizing his firelock.
"And here is another that replies in the tone in which it is questioned."
The intentions of the unknown were not hostile, nor had he any idea of carrying out his threat, though he did not lack the courage to do it. Another so daring as he did not tread the soil of Andalucia. But the arrogance of the poor worn youth pleased instead of offending him.
"Comrade," he said, "I always like to take off my hat before drawing my sword, but it suits me to know with whom I speak and whom I meet on the road. You must have courage to be walking here; for they say that Diego and his band are in this neighborhood, and you know, for all Spain knows, who Diego is; where he puts his eye he puts his ball. The leaves tremble upon the trees at sight of him, and the dead in their graves at the sound of his name."
All this was said without that Andalucian boastfulness, so grotesquely exaggerated in these days, but with the naturalness of conviction, and the serenity of one who states a simple truth.
"What do I care for Diego and his band?" exclaimed Perico, not with bravado, but with the most profound dejection.
As with failing voice he pronounced these words, he tottered and leaned his head upon his gun.
"What has taken you? What is the matter?" asked the stranger, noticing his weakness.
Perico did not reply, for so great was his exhaustion and such the effect of his recent emotions that he fell down senseless.
The unknown knelt down beside him and lifted his head. The moon shone full upon that face, beautiful notwithstanding its mortal paleness, and the traces of passion, anguish, and grief which marred it.
"He is dead," said the stranger to himself, placing his rough hand upon Perico's heart. The heart which, a few days before, was as pure as the sky of May. "No," he continued, "he is not dead, but will die here, like a dog, if he is not taken care of."
And he looked at him again, for he felt awakening in his heart that noble attraction which draws the strong toward the weak, the powerful toward the helpless; for let skeptics say what they will, there is a spark of divinity in the breast of every human creature. He rose to his feet and whistled.
He is answered by the sound of a brisk gallop, and a beautiful young horse, with arched neck and rolling mane, comes up and stops before his master, turning his fine head and brilliant eyes as if to offer him the stirrup.
The unknown raises the inanimate Perico in his robust arms, throws him across the horse, springs up beside him, presses his knees gently to the animal's flanks, and the noble creature darts away, gayly and lightly, as if unconscious of the double weight.
CHAPTER XIV.
In a solitary hostel, standing like a beggar beside the highway, the innkeeper and his wife were seated before their fire, in the dull tranquillity of persons as accustomed to the alternations of noisy life by day and complete isolation by night as the inhabitants of marshy places are to their intermittent fevers.
"May evil light on that hard-skulled sailor who took it into his head that there must be a new world, and never stopped till he ran against it," said the woman. "Had not the king already cities enough in this? What good has it done? Taken our sons off there, and sent us the epidemic. Do say, Andres, and don't sit sleeping there like a mole, if it has been of any other use."
"Yes, wife, yes," answered the innkeeper, half' opening his eyes, "the silver comes from there."
"Plague take the silver!" exclaimed the woman.
"And the tobacco," added the husband, slowly and lazily, again closing his eyes,
"A curse upon the tobacco!" said the wife angrily. "Do you think, you unfeeling father, that the silver or the tobacco are worth the lives they cost and the tears? Son of my soul! God knows what will become of him in that land where they kill men like chinches, and where everything is venomous, even the air!"
They heard at this moment a peculiar whistle. The innkeeper, springing to his feet, caught up the light and ran toward the door, exclaiming, "The captain!"
As he presented himself on the threshold, the rays of the lamp fell upon a man on horseback, with another man that looked like a corpse lying across the horse in front of him.
"Help me take this fellow down," said the rider, in the rough tone of a man of few words.
The innkeeper handed the lamp to his wife, who had approached, and made haste to obey.
"Mercy to us! A dead man!" said she. "For the love of the Blessed Mother, sir, do not leave him in our house!"
"He is not dead," said the horseman, "he is sick; nurse him up--that is what women ore good for. Here is money to pay for the cure."
Saying this, he threw down a piece of gold, and disappeared, the resounding and measured gallop of his horse dying away gradually in the distance.
"If this is not a cool proceeding!" grumbled Martha. "What will you bet that he, with his own hands, has not put the man in this state? and he takes himself off and leaves him on ours! 'You cure him!' as if it were nothing to cure a man who is dead or dying! As if this inn were an hospital! The bully thinks he has only to command, as if he were the king!"
"Hush!" exclaimed the innkeeper, alarmed, "will you be still, long-tongue! Talk that way of Diego! Women are the very devil! What is the use of grumbling, since you know there is nothing for it but to do as these people tell us! Besides, this is a work of charity, so let's be about it."
They prepared, as well as they could, a bed in a garret.
"He has no sign of blow or wound," said Andres, as he was undressing the patient; "so you see, wife, it is a sickness like any other."
"Look, look, Andres!" exclaimed Martha; "he has the scapular of our Lady of Carmel around his neck."
And as if the sight or influence of the blessed object had awakened in her all the gentle sentiments of Christian humility, or as if the sacred precept, "Thy neighbor as thyself," uttered by the brotherhood in united devotion, had resounded clearly, she began to exclaim: "You were right, Andres, it is a work of charity to assist him, poor fellow! How young he is, and how forsaken! His poor mother! Come, come, Andres, what are you doing, standing there like a post? Go! hurry! bring me some wine to rub his temples; and kill a hen, for I am going to make him some broth."
"So it is," soliloquized Andres, as he went out--"at first, wouldn't have him in the house; now she will turn the house out of the windows for him. That's the way with women. It is hard to understand them."
On the following night, a man of evil face and repugnant aspect came to the inn. This man had been in the penitentiary, and was nicknamed the convict.
"God be with you, sir," said the innkeeper, with more fear than cordiality, "what might be your pleasure?"
"A whim of the captain's, curse him! for haven't I come to ask after the sick, like the porter of a convent?"
"He is not doing very well," answered the innkeeper; "he is in a raging fever, is out of his mind, and talks of a murder he has done--of dead men's heads."
"Ho! so then he is a man that can handle arms," said the convict. "Let's have a look at him."
They mounted to the garret, and the innkeeper continued:
"All day long I have been in a cold sweat with fear. There have been people in the house, and even soldiers--if they had heard him!"
The convict, who had been examining the delicate and wasted form of Perico, interrupted with a movement of disdain.
"Well, if he makes too much noise for you, quarter him upon the king." [Footnote 186]
[Footnote 186: Put him into the street.]
"No, indeed!" cried Martha, "poor unfortunate! I have a son in America who may be at this very hour in the same condition, abandoned by every one, and calling, as this one calls, for his mother. No, no, sir, we shall not desert him. Neither Our Lady, whose scapular he wears, nor I."
"Buy him sweetmeats," said the convict, and went down.
"What news?' he asked of the innkeeper.
"They say that a reward is to be offered for Diego's head."
"What?" asked the convict again, with quick and unusual interest. The innkeeper repeated what he had said. The convict considered a moment, and then continued,
"Where do they think we are?"
"Near Despenaperros."
"Are they after us?"
"Yes, there is a cavalry company at Sevilla, one of infantry at Cordoba, and another of the mountain soldiery at Utrera."
"There will be some shoes worn out before they see our faces, and if they do get to see them it will cost them dear."
"Yes, yes," Andres replied; "we know that whoever puts himself in Diego's way may as well look for his grave; but then--there may be so many of them . . ."
"Perhaps you would like to get a crack of my fist on your bugle?" said the bandit.
"Not at all," said Andres, retreating a step or two.
"Put more ballast in your tongue then--and hurry up with the bread --quick now!"
Andres hastened to obey. The bandit was going away when he heard Martha's voice calling after him.
"It slipped my mind--you take this money," she said, handing him the piece of gold. "Give it to the captain, and tell him that what I do for this lad I do for charity, and not for interest."
"I shall be sure to give him such a reason. He accepts 'No' neither when he says give, nor when he says take; but to settle it between you, I will keep the money;" and setting spurs to his horse, he disappeared.
"You have done a wise thing!" said the innkeeper impatiently. "Will the money, you foolish good-for-nothing, be better in the hands of that big thief than in ours? Women!--ill hap to them! Only the devil understands them."
"I understand myself and God understands me," said the good woman, returning to the garret.
CHAPTER XI.
The care of the innkeeper's wife and the youth and robust constitution of Perico vanquished the fever. At the end of a fortnight he was able to rise.
Perico evinced all his gratitude to Martha in a manner more heartfelt than fluent.
"You must not thank me" said the good woman, "for truly, the face I put on when I saw you brought was not one of welcome; but I have taken a liking to you because I see that you are a good son and a good Christian."
Perico hung his head in deep grief and humiliation. His physical weakness had deadened in him the blind and furious impulse which had exalted him, as such impulse does sometimes exalt gentle and timid natures to a point past the limit which strong-minded and even violent men respect.
All that effervescence which caused such a surging of his passions, as gas causes the juice of the grape to ferment, had ceased, as the foam subsides upon the wine, leaving reflection, which, without diminishing the greatness of his wrongs, condemned his method of redressing them.
All the horror which the future inspired returned to Perico with returning strength, and it was not lessened when Andres, taking the occasion one day when his wife was about her work, said to him:
"My friend, now that you are recovered you must seek your living somewhere else, for--the more friendship, the more frankness, sir--when you were out of your head you talked of a murder you had committed. If it is true, and they find you here, we shall suffer for it, and that will not be right; the just ought not to pay for sinners; well-regulated charity, let Martha, who pretends to know better, say what she will, begins at home. Nobody but that pumpkin-headed wife of mine is capable of sustaining that Christian charity begins with one's neighbor. As to me, I tell you the truth, I want nothing to do with justice, for she has a heavy hand."
Perico did not reply, but went with tearful eyes to take leave of Martha. The good soul felt his departure, for she had become fond of him. The memory of her son had attached Martha to the unfortunate young man, and the memory of his own mother had drawn Perico toward the woman who acted toward him a mother's part.
He took his gun, and was going out when he met the convict.
"Which way?" said the robber. "Do you clear out in this fashion, without so much as May God reward you! to the compassionate soul who picked you up? This isn't the right thing, comrade. Besides, where can you go hereabouts? Are you in a hurry to be put in the lock-up?"
Perico remained silent; he neither thought nor reasoned--had no will of his own. "Courage! and come along," proceeded the convict. "Here we are taking more trouble to help you than you will take to let yourself be helped." Perico followed him mechanically.
"Look, Martha," said Andres, seeing Perico at a distance in company with the robber, "look at your pet--and what a jewel he is, to be sure! There he goes with the convict."
"And what of it?" responded Martha. "I tell you, Andres, that he is a good son and a good Christian."
"An impostor and a vagabond, that has eaten up my hens--and you see where he is going, and yet say that he is good! The devil only understands women!"
Perico and the convict, making their way through thickets and difficult places, came at last to an elevation, upon which stood the captain leaning on his gun, and guarding the slumbers of eight men, who were lying around him on the slope. Near him grazed his beautiful horse, which lifted its head from time to time to regard its master.
"Here is this young man," said the convict as they drew near.
Without changing his position, the captain slowly turned his eyes and examined the new arrival from head to foot. His scrutiny finished, he asked,
"Are you a fugitive from justice?"
Perico inclined his head, but did not answer.
"There is no cause for fear," proceeded his questioner, and presently, in brief phrases, added,
"Men have fatal hours, and of these some are as red as blood and some as black as darkness itself. One is enough to destroy a man, and turn his heart to a stone which has neither pulse nor feeling, only weight. He remains lost, for the past is past, and there is nothing to do but bear it with pluck. Life is a fight, in which one must look before him, like a brave man, and not behind, like a poltroon."
"I cannot do it," exclaimed Perico vehemently. "If you knew--"
The captain, with an imperative gesture, extended his arm to silence him, and continued.
"Here, each one carries his own secrets within himself, a sealed packet, without awakening in the others either curiosity or interest. If you have nowhere to go, stay with us; here we defend all we have left, our life. Mine I do not guard because I value it, but to keep it from the headsman."
"But you rob?" said Perico.
"We must do something," responded the bandit, returning, like a tortoise, into his hard and impenetrable shell.
Perico neither accepted nor refused the proposition, he remained without volition, an inert body; chance disposed of his wretched existence, as the winds dispose of the dry and heavy sands of the desert.
CHAPTER XVI.
But while Perico, after the occurrences which we have related, was dragging out a miserable existence among a band of criminals, what became of the other individuals of this family? To what extremes had they been carried by resentment, grief, despair, and revenge?
Pedro, from the fatal day on which he lost his son, had shut himself in his own house with his sorrow. The parish priest and some of his friends went from time to time to keep him company--not to console him, that was impossible, but to talk with him about his trouble, like those who relieve vessels of the bitter water of the sea, not to right them but to keep them from sinking. They had tried to persuade him to renew his intercourse with the family of Perico, but without success.
"No, no," he would answer on such occasions. "I have forgiven him before God and men; but have to do with his people as though it had not been, I cannot."
"Pedro, Pedro, that is not forgiveness," said the priest. "It is the letter but not the spirit of the law."
"Father," replied the poor man, "God does not ask what is impossible."
"No, but what he requires is possible."
"Sir, you want me to be a saint, and I am not one; it is enough for me to be a good Christian, and forgive. Have I molested them? Have I sought justice? What more can I do?"
"Pedro, returning good for evil, wise men walk in peace."
"Mercy, mercy, father! why shave so close as to lay bare the brains? God help and favor them; but each in his own house, and God with us all."
Maria had hidden herself with her daughter in the retirement of her cottage, covering the despair and shame of the latter with the sacred mantle of maternal love, her only refuge from the unanimous disapproval and condemnation which she justly merited. The unfortunate victims, Anna and Elvira, remained alone, but sustained in their immense affliction by their religion and their conscience. Many months passed in this way. At length two Capuchins came to the village to hold a mission. These missions were instituted for the conversion of the wicked, the awakening of the luke-warm, the encouragement of the good, and the consolation of the sorrowful.
The missionaries preached at night, and the church was filled with people who came to hear the word of God, which teaches men to be pious and humble.
The good Maria succeeded in persuading her daughter to go to the missions, and Rita, hard, bitter, and selfish, in her shame and desperation, found in them repentance, with tears for the past, penance and humiliation for the present, and for the future the divine hand, which lifts the fallen one, who, bathed in tears, and prostrate in ashes, implores its help. One night the subject of the sermon was the forgiveness of injuries. Magnificent theme! Holy and sublime beyond all others! The earnest preacher knew how to improve it, and the believing people how to understand it.
At the conclusion the good missionary knelt before the crucifix, and with fervent zeal and ardent charity promised the Lord of mercy, in the name of that multitude kneeling at his feet, that on the succeeding night there should not be in the temple a single hard and unreconciled heart. A burst of exclamations and tears confirmed the promise of the devoted apostle.
The day which followed was one of peace and love, according to the spirit of the evangel. The most deeply-rooted enmities were ended; the most irreconcilable foes embraced each other in the streets; the angels in heaven had cause for rejoicing.
Pedro went to see Anna. Terrible to the unhappy man was the entering into that house. He approached Anna and embraced her in silence. The afflicted mother shook, and tried in vain to overcome her emotion. But when Pedro turned toward Elvira, as she stood wringing her thin hands, worn to a shadow and bathed in tears--when [{794}] he pressed to his paternal heart her whom he had looked upon and loved as a daughter, all his grief broke forth in the cry: "Daughter! daughter! you and I loved him!"
Rita, also, went to Anna's to beg for that which Pedro went to carry. When she found herself in the presence of the mother-in-law she had outraged, she fell upon her knees. "I," she exclaimed, beating her breast, "have been the cause of all! I have not come to ask a forgiveness I do not deserve, but to beg of you to reprimand without cursing me." When she turned to Elvira, it was not enough to remain on her knees, she bent her face to the floor, moaning amidst her sobs. "Since you are an angel, forgive!"
Maria supported her prostrate child, and implored Anna with her looks and tears. Anna and Elvira, without a word of reproach, raised and embraced her who had done so much to injure them; striving all they could from that day to reanimate her, for she was the most wretched of the three, because the guilty one.
All the people looked with charity upon the woman who had sincerely and publicly repented, for although the society called cultivated finds in religious demonstrations another cause for vituperation, adding to the condemnation of faults which it never forgets the reproach of hypocrisy upon those who turn to God, the people, more generous and more just, honor the open evidence of penitence and humiliation. Therefore, when they saw Rita abase herself and weep, their indignation was exchanged for compassion, and the epithet "infamous!" for the pitiful words "poor child!"
This was because the common people, though they know not what philanthropy means, know well, because religion teaches them, what is Christian charity.
CHAPTER XVII.
To Perico, the life into which he found himself drawn by necessity, and by the vigorous influence Diego exercised over him, was one of misery; Diego also had been drawn into a life of crime by a terrible misfortune; but having entered, he adopted it as a warrior does his iron armor, without heeding either its hardness or its oppressive weight. Perico followed his wicked companions while he detested them. He was like the silver fish of some peaceful inland lake which, caught by some fatal current, is carried away into the bitter and restless waters of the sea, where it agonizes without the power to escape. At times, when a crime was committed under his eyes, he wished in his desperation to end his torments at once, by giving himself up to justice; but shame, and want of energy to overcome it, held him back. The others hated him, and surnamed him "The Sad," but he was sustained by Diego's powerful protection. Diego felt attracted toward the man whose life he had saved, and who was, he felt, good and honest. For the rough and austere Diego was of a strong and noble nature that had not yet descended to the lowest grade of evil, which is hatred of the good.
In one of their raids, when the band had approached Tas Yentas, near Alocaz, a spy arrived in breathless haste from Utrera, telling them that a company of mountain soldiery had just left the latter place in the direction of Tas Yentas, informed of their whereabouts by some travellers they had lately pillaged.
They made haste to take refuge in an olive grove, but had hardly entered it when they were surprised by a troop of cavalry. A deadly contest then commenced, sustained by these men, who were fighting for their lives with terrible bravery.
"Perico," said Diego, "now or never is the occasion to prove that you do not eat your bread without earning it. This is a fair fight. At them, if you are a man!"
On hearing these words, Perico, confused, and like a drunken man, threw himself in the way of the balls, firing upon the poor soldiers--men who were sacrificing everything for the good of society, which, in its egotism, does not even thank them; for it happens to them as to the confessors and doctors, who are laughed at in health, and anxiously called upon when there is any danger. One of the bandits was killed, two of the soldiers wounded, and a ball of Perico's, fired at a great distance, killed the commander of the troop. The consternation which followed this catastrophe gave the robbers an opportunity to escape. They fled beyond Utrera, passed through the haciendas of La Chaparra and Jesus-Maria, and arrived exhausted at nightfall in Valobrega. This valley, not far from Alcalá is surrounded by ridges and olive slopes. In the most retired part of it, on the margin of a brook, are still standing the ruins of a Moorish castle called Marchenilla. Men and horses threw themselves upon the turf at the base of these solitary ruins. They quenched their thirst in the brook, and when night set, in lighted a fire, and all except Diego and Perico lay down to sleep.
"An evil day, Corso," said Diego, caressing his horse, which lowered and then lifted his beautiful head as if to assent to his master's words, and say to him, "What matter since I have saved you?"
"I treat thee shamefully, my son," continued the chief, who loved his horse the more fondly because he loved no other creature. The horse, as if he had understood, neighed gaily, and, rising on his hind feet, balanced himself, and then dropped down upon all four beside his master, presenting his head to be caressed.
"What will become of thee if l am taken?" said the robber, leaning his head against the neck of the animal, which now stood motionless.
"Truly," said Diego, seating himself by the fire in front of Perico, "it is to you we owe our escape to-day with so little loss."
"To me?" asked Perico surprised.
"Yes," answered the captain; "the troop was commanded by a brave officer, who knew the country, and did not mean child's play. The son of the Countess of Villaoran. He would have given us work if you had not killed him."
"God have mercy on me!" exclaimed Perico, springing to his feet and raising his clasped hands to heaven. "What are you saying? The son of the countess was there, and I killed him?"
"What shocks you?" replied Diego.
"Perhaps you thought we were firing sugar-plums? Heavens!" he added impatiently, "you exasperate me! One would take you for a travelling player, with all your attitudes and extravagances. By all that's sacred, the convict is right. You missed your vocation; instead of choosing a life of freedom you should have turned friar. Come! keep watch," he added, wrapping himself in his mantle, and lying down with a stone under his head and his carbine between his knees.
His words were lost upon Perico. The unhappy man tore his hair and cursed himself in his despair. He had killed the son of the mistress and benefactress of his uncles, his own companion of childhood.
CHAPTER XVIII.
How vividly, during that gloomy night did the tranquil scenes of his lost domestic happiness present themselves to Perico! And for what had he exchanged them? His present frightful existence. All around him was motionless. He saw in the sad monotony of the night the changeless monotony of his misery; in the fire [{796}] burning before him, his consuming conscience; and in the cold and impenetrable obscurity beyond, his dark and cheerless future.
"Power of God!" he cried, "can I see and remember, and feel all this, and yet live?"
The red and wavering flame threw from time to time a glare of light across the strange wild forms of the ruins, presently leaving them in deep shadow, appearing to take refuge within, as a dying memory flashes up and then buries itself in the oblivion of the past. He heard his own breathing exaggerated by the silence, he saw horrible shapes in the obscurity. Fingers threatened him--eyes glared at him--reproachful voices accused him. And no, he was not mistaken, by the clearer light of the flames, now blown by the wind, he saw, beyond a remnant of wall, a pair of hard black eyes fixed upon him. Startled, and doubtful between the imaginary and the real, Perico did not know whether he ought to put himself under the protection of heaven, by making the sign of the cross, or to call for earthly help by giving the signal of alarm.
Before he could act, there came from behind the stone ruin a ruin of humanity; from behind the degradation of time, a wreck of human degradation--an old, filthy, and disgusting gipsy woman. The tint of the brown woollen skirts which covered her fleshless limbs blended with that of the ruin; she wore about her neck a kerchief, and over her faded locks a black cloth mantilla.
Perico was struck motionless as a stone, or as if the repulsive face had been that of the Medusa.
"Don't be uneasy," said the vision, approaching, "there is nothing to be afraid of. I have not come with bad motive, and you need not be on the watch. I knew that you were here, and have caused it to be rumored that you were making your way in the direction of the Sierra de Ronda, and that people had seen you near Espera and Villa-Martin."
"But why have you come here?" exclaimed Perico, instinctively alarmed at the aspect of the woman.
"To put you in the way of securing, at a stroke, a fortune that will last you your lifetime," she replied.
"That which you are likely to offer does not inspire much confidence," said Perico.
"Why should I wish to harm you?" said the gipsy; "and as to my looks, a poor cloak may cover a hail companion. I bring a treasure to your very hands; you have only to extend them."
"A treasure," said Perico, in whom the word, instead of exciting covetousness, only suggested the idea that the woman was mad, "a treasure, and where is it?"
The old wretch, who saw in the question only what she expected to find, avidity and thirst for gold, approached Perico as if she feared the breath of night might intercept her words, and the anathemas of heaven dissolve them in the air, and whispered in his ear, "In the church."
Perico, utterly shocked, gave a step backward, but recovering himself, rushed upon the woman like a tiger, and pushing her with all his might, exclaimed, "Go!"
"I will not go," she said, unintimidated; "I came to speak with the captain and the convict, and I will speak with them."
In his anguish lest she should do it, and to force her to go, Perico drew a dagger and flashed its shining blade in the firelight. The gipsy shrieked and the robbers woke.
"What is this?" shouted Diego; "what has happened? Perico, are you going to kill a woman?"
"No, no, I do not want to kill her, only to drive her away."
"And because," said the old woman, "I have come so far, through danger and fatigue, to put you in a way to leave this slavish life you are leading, like the Blond of Espera, who committed one robbery so great that he had enough to go beyond the seas and pass the rest of his days in comfort."
The robbers grouped themselves around her; the convict presenting her with a fragment of the wall as a seat.
"Do not listen! do not listen!" cried Perico, beside himself; "she purposes a sacrilege!"
"Sir," said the convict to Diego, "oblige that agonizing priest to hold his tongue, he is like the dog in the manger. Let this good woman speak, and we shall know what she has to say--a regiment of horse couldn't silence that dismal screech-owl."
Diego hesitated, but finally turned toward the hag, and Perico, knowing then that hope was lost, for the bandit always followed his first impulses, rushed away, running hither and thither among the olives like a madman.
The gipsy had calculated everything, and her measures were well taken. The great advantages so exaggerated, the difficulties so easily overcome, the well-arranged precautions, upon which she amplified so largely, produced their effect. The temptation which offers flowers with one hand and with the other hides the thorns, convinced some and seduced others.
All the plans were settled, and the hours and signals agreed upon, and before the cocks, day's faithful sentinels, announced his coming, the band was on its way to the solitary hacienda of "El Cuervo," and the old witch crawling like a cunning and venomous snake to her den in the wood of Alcalá, where in the depths of the earth she had conceived the crime to which amidst darkness and ruins she had persuaded evil-doers--the crime which was to be perpetrated in the temple of God.
CHAPTER XIX.
Heavily passed the hours of the succeeding day to the idle guests of El Cuervo. All Perico's representations and prayers had failed to dissuade Diego from his impious design. Diego would never turn back; and this stupid tenacity in pursuing a course which he knew to be wrong, had cost him respect and honor, and was still to cost him liberty and life. It had, moreover, at the instigation of the convict, forced Perico, who had at last resolved to leave the band, to accompany it on this atrocious expedition--that vile man suggesting to Diego that there was no other means of preventing the saint from denouncing them.
All mounted and at midnight reached the ruined castle of Alcalá. Diego whistled three times. Directly after, the gipsy, holding a dark lantern, emerged from one of the vaults which open at the base of the castle. They dismounted and followed her.
Perico would have escaped by flight from the evil pass in which he found himself, but his companions surrounded him and dragged him with them whither the woman led. She, after saluting the robbers in a fawning voice, opened with a picklock the door of a rude court filled with rubbish and timbers. From the court a postern leads into the vestry, and through this the sacrilegious band entered the church, not without dread and trembling even at the sound of their own footsteps.
What a sublime and tremendous spectacle--a deserted temple in the dead of night! Under its influence even the purest and most pious souls sink in profound awe and devotion; and no amount of incredulity is sufficient to sustain the heart of him who presumes to violate it.
How immense appeared those shadowy naves! How far above them the corbels, which, upheld by giants of stone, seemed almost lost in the mysterious gloom of a sky without stars! There in a deep and lonesome niche, stretched prostrate and mute, slept a cold effigy upon a sepulchre. Its outlines were hardly discernible, but the very obscurity seemed to lend them motion.
The high altar, still perfumed with the flowers and incense of the morning, gleamed through the darkness. The altar, centre of faith, throne of charity, refuge of hope, shelter of the defenceless, exhaustless source of consolations, attracting all eyes, all steps, all hearts. Before the tabernacle burned the lamp, solitary guardian of the sacrarium--burned only to light it, for light is the knowledge of God.
Holy and mysterious lamp--continual holocaust--aflame, tranquil like hope--silent, like reverence--ardent, like charity--and enduring like eternal mercy. The gleams and reflections of this light caught and relieved the prominent points of the carvings and mouldings of the gilded altarpiece, giving them the look of eyes keeping religious watch. There was nothing to distract the mind, the perfect fixedness, the unbroken stillness, effected as it were a suspension of life, which was not sleep--which was not death, but the peacefulness of the one and the deep solemnity of the other.
Such was the interior of the church of Alcalá when the spoilers entered, lighted by the gipsy's lantern and dragging with them, by main force, the unfortunate Perico.
"Let him go, and lock that door," said Diego.
"He will shout and betray us," said the others.
"Let him go, I say," retorted the captain. "What can he do?"
"He can shriek," answered Leon, who, assisted by the gipsy, was stripping the high altar of the silver furniture which adorned it.
"Guard him, then," said the captain. Two of the men approached Perico.
"Off with your hats, for you are in God's house,"' he cried.
"Gag him," commanded the captain, Resistance was useless. They instantly stopped his mouth with a handkerchief.
But notwithstanding the handkerchief, which suffocated him, when Perico saw that Leon and the gipsy were breaking open the sacrarium he made one desperate effort, and falling on his knees shouted, "Sacrilege! Sacrilege!!!" Terrible was the voice that resounded in the chapels, that echoed like thunder along the vaults, that awakened the grand and sonorous instrument which on other occasions accompanies the imposing De profundis and the glorious Te Deum, and died away in its metal tubes like a doleful wail. It caused a moment of cold terror to those miserable wretches. Even Diego trembled!
"Have mercy, Lord, have mercy!" moaned the unhappy Perico.
"Make haste," said Diego, "the night is becoming clearer, and we may be seen going out from here."
In fact, the clouds were breaking away, and a ray of the moon falling at this moment through a lofty skylight kissed the feet of an image of our Blessed Lady.
"Curse the moon!" exclaimed the gipsy; and frightened at seeing each other by the clear and sudden illumination, they hastened the work of spoliation. At last they left the church, and the gipsy, when she had seen them ride away loaded with riches, turned and again hid herself in the earth.
Before the sun brightened the Giralda the robbers reached the outskirts of Seville with their booty, They left their horses in an olive grove in charge of the convict, and each entered the city by a different gate, reuniting in an out-of-the-way place which the gipsy had indicated, where a silver-smith, who was in the secret, received, weighed, and paid for the valuables. But when they returned to the place where they had left the convict with the horses, they found it deserted.
"That dog has sold us," said one.
"For what?" said Diego, "when his part, which is likely to be worth more than his treason, is here."
"Perhaps he has seen people, and has gone to hide in El Cuervo," said another.
They set out in the direction of the hacienda, avoiding roads and beaten paths, and keeping within the shelter of the trees; but neither there did they find the convict.
"My poor Corso!" said Diego, and a bitter tear shone for a moment in his eyes; but instantly recovering himself he said, "We are sold: but, courage! and let us save ourselves. Down the river; to the frontier; to Ayamonte; to Portugal. Some day I shall find him, and on that day he will wish he had never been born!"
They were leaving, when the gipsy presented herself to claim her share of the money. All assailed her with questions respecting the disappearance of the convict; but she knew nothing, and manifested much uneasiness.
"You are not safe here, and ought to get away as soon as may be," she said. "The elder son of the Countess of Villaoran has sworn to avenge his brother. He has got a troop from the captain-general, and is out after you. I am afraid he has surprised the convict. As for me I am going, the ground burns under my feet."
"Oh! that it would burn you up!" exclaimed one.
"Oh! that it would swallow you!" exclaimed another.
The old hag silently disappeared among the olives, like a viper which crawls away, leaving its venom in the bite it has inflicted.
"A robbery in the house of God!" said the first.
"The sacrarium violated!" said the other.
"Come, hold your tongues!" shouted Diego. "Make the best of what can't be undone. Let's be off."
But now they heard the tramp of horses, and Perico, who had been stationed to watch, came hastily in and informed them that the convict was coming. His arrival was greeted with shouts of joy. He said that he had seen a troop of horsemen, and had hidden himself; that in order to return he had been obliged to make large circuits. "But, now," he added, "we have no time to lose, they are on our track. Here, captain, is Corso, I have taken good care of him for you; I know how fond of him you are."
Diego joyfully caressed the noble creature vowing within himself never again to be separated from him.
They hastened their departure, when, suddenly, before them, behind them, above their heads, resounded a formidable demand, "Surrender to the king!"
They were surrounded by a party of cavalry. Two pistols were pointed at Diego's breast, and a man held the bridle of his horse. Diego cast his eyes around him with no feigned composure! Knowing the ability of the horse, which he had trained to this end, he drew his dagger with the quickness of light, and cut the hands which held the reins, pressed his knees strongly against the animal's sides, and, caressing his neck, cried, "Hey! Corso, save your master!"
The noble and intelligent creature made one effort, but fell back upon his haunches powerless. He was hamstrung!
Diego comprehended the blow, and knew the hand that had dealt it. Frantic with rage, he sprang to the ground, but the traitor had disappeared among the troop which crowded the pass. They took Diego, who made no useless resistance. As they left the defile, the bandit turned his head, and cast a last look upon the horse, that, always immovable, followed him with his large liquid eyes.
The soldiers disarmed the bandits, and tied their arms behind their backs. "Which is the one?" asked the Count of Villaoran when he saw them together--"which is the one that killed my brother?"
The robbers were silent at a look from Diego, who, though a prisoner and bound, still awed them.
"Which was it?" asked the count again, in a voice choked with rage.
"It was I," said Perico.
The count turned toward the drooping youth, who had not before attracted his notice; but when he fixed his eyes upon him a cry of horror escaped his lips.
"You! Perico Alvareda! Iniquity without name! Perversity without example! Poor Anna! wretched mother that bore you! Unfortunate little ones! Unhappy Rita! Know, infamous man," continued the count with vehemence, "that your wife has worked with incessant zeal and activity to procure your pardon. She was always at the feet of the judges. Ventura forgave you before he died. Pedro has forgiven you. My poor brother was the zealous and tireless agent of your friends. He obtained your pardon of the king. All were anxiously seeking you, and he more than all the rest, and I--would to God I had never found you!"
Diego, who saw the immense grief which the coldness and pallor of death painted upon the changing countenance of Perico, and noticed that he was tottering, said to the count:
"Sir, do you see that you are killing him?"
"I will not anticipate the executioner," answered the count, mounting his horse.
"Courage!" murmured Diego in the ear of the sinking Perico. "Look at us. We are all going to die, and we are all serene."
They entered Seville amidst the maledictions of the populace, horrified by their recent crimes. But the indignation with which the crowd saw the vile traitor who had sold his companions, walking among them free, was beyond measure.
This traitor was the convict, who by betraying the others had bought his own pardon, and obtained the reward promised to the person who should secure the arrest of the notorious robber Diego, who had so long laughed at the efforts of his pursuers.
CHAPTER XX.
The prison of Seville was at that time badly situated, in a narrow street in the most central part of the city. It was an ill-looking structure, scaly and mean; wanting in its style the dignity of legal authority and the outward respect which humanity owes to misfortune, even when it is criminal. A few steps from this centre of hardened wickedness and beastly degradation the street ends in the grand plaza of San Francisco--an irregular oblong area, bounded by those edifices which make it the most imposing plaza of the famed deanery of Andalucia, On the right are the chapter-houses whose exquisite architecture renders them in the eyes of both Sevillans and strangers the finest ornaments of the city. On the left, forming a projecting angle, stands the regular and severe edifice of the Audiencia, the tribunal to which justice gives all power. Surmounting it, like a signal of mercy, is its clock--ten minutes too slow; venerable illegality, which gives ten minutes more of life to the criminal before striking the cruel hour named for his execution. Thus all the laws and customs of ancient Spain have the seal of charity. Ten minutes, to him who is passing tranquilly along the road of life, are nothing; but to him who is about to die, they are priceless. Upon the threshold of death, ten minutes may decide his sentence for eternity. Ten minutes may bring an unhoped-for but possible pardon. But even though these considerations, spiritual and temporal, did not exist; though this impressive souvenir of our forefathers were nothing more than the grant of ten minutes of existence to him who is about to die, it would still prove that, even to their most severe decrees, our ancestors knew how to affix the seal of charity. As such it is recognized by the people, who understand and appreciate it, for it is one of the customs which they hold in highest reverence. O Spain! what examples hast thou not given to the world of all that is good and wise! thou that to-day art asking them of strangers!
On one side of the town-hall, forming a receding angle, is seen the great convent of San Francisco with its imposing church. The other fronts form arches that, like stone festoons, adorn the sides of the plaza. At the end opposite the point first mentioned is an immense marble fountain, of which the flow of waters is as changeless and lasting as the material of the basin which receives it.
One day the plaza of San Francisco and the streets leading to it were covered with an unusual multitude. What drew them together? Why were they there? To see a man die--but no, not die; to see a man kill his brother! To die is solemn, not terrible, when the angel gently closes the sufferer's weary eyes and gives his soul wings to rise to other regions. But to see a man killed, by a human hand, in travail of spirit, in agony of soul, in tortures of pain, is appalling. And yet men go, and hasten, and crowd each other, to witness the consummation of legal doom. But it is neither pleasure nor curiosity that attracts the awe-struck multitude. It is that fatal desire of emotion which takes possession of the contradictory human heart. This might have been read in those faces, at once pale, anxious, and horrified. An indistinct murmur ran through the dense multitude, in the midst of which rose that pillar of shame and anguish; that usurper of the mission of death; that foothold of the forsaken, which no one but the priest treads voluntarily--the fearful scaffold, built at night, by the melancholy light of lanterns, because the men who raise it are ashamed to be seen by the light of God's sun and the eyes of their fellowmen. The crowd shuddered at intervals at the mournful strokes of the bell of San Francisco, pealing for a being who no longer existed except to God, for the world had blotted him from the list of the living. Its notes, now rising to God in supplication for a soul, now descending to mortals in expressive admonition, forming part of the overwhelming solemnity which was inhaled with the air and oppressed the breast, seemed to say, Die, guilty ones die in expiatory sacrifice for this sinful humanity. Only the pure and limpid fountain continued its sweet and monotonous song, unconscious as childhood and innocence of the terrors of the earth. O innocence, emanation of Paradise, still respired in our corrupted atmosphere by children and those privileged beings who have, like faith, a bandage upon their eyes, that they may believe without seeing, and another upon their hearts, that they may see and not comprehend; who have, like charity, their heart in their hand, and, like hope, their eyes fixed on heaven, thou art always surrounded by reverence, love, and admiration, which, as the daughter of heaven, thou meritest.
There are two classes of charity: one relieves material sufferings in a material way, and with money--this is beautiful and liberal, but easy, and a social obligation. The other is that which relieves moral anguish, morally. This is sublime and divine. Of the latter class, one that has not been sufficiently praised by society, which finds so many occasions for censure and so few for eulogy, is the Brotherhood of Charity. And who compose this admirable congregation? Those, perhaps, who waste so much paper and phraseology in favor of humanity, philanthropy, and fraternity? No, not one of them condescends to enter this corporation, which is formed principally of the aristocracy of those places where it has been established. The truth is, that between theory and practice, as between saying and doing, there is a great space.
In Seville, a short time after the events related in the last chapter, several gentlemen of distinction were seen passing through the streets, each holding out a small basket, as he repeated in a grave voice, "For the unfortunates who are to be put to death."
Diego and his band were assembled in the chapel of the prison, constantly attended by some of the brotherhood, who, leaving their homes, their pleasures, and their occupations, came to take part in this prolonged agony, consoling the last moments of these sinful men; anticipating their wishes with more attention than those of kings are anticipated, and pouring balsam into the wound inflicted by the sword of justice.
Two of the most zealous and devoted of the brotherhood, the Count of Cantillana and the Marquis of Greffina, had been to the tribunal, which is established and remains in session in the jail while the condemned are being prepared and led to the scaffold, and during the execution, to ask of it the bodies of those who were to suffer. The following is the formula adopted by this noble and affecting Catholic institution:
"We come, in the name of Joseph and of Nicodemus, to ask leave to take the body down from the place of punishment." The judge grants the prayer, and they withdraw.
Each prisoner was accompanied by his confessor--a blessed staff to sustain the steps that are turned toward the scaffold.
When Perico had finished his sacramental confession, he said to the venerable religious who assisted him: "My name is not known; they call me 'Perico the Sad;' but, since between earth and heaven nothing is hidden, my family will, sooner or later, know my fate. Have the charity, father, to fulfil my last desire, and be yourself the one to carry the news to my mother. Tell her that I died repentant and contrite, and not so criminal as I appear. An evil life is a ravine into which one is drawn by the first crime. That crime which has weighed and is weighing so heavily upon me, I committed because I preferred a vain thing which men call honor, and which has sometimes to be bought with blood, to the precepts of the gospel, which make a virtue of forbearance and command us to forgive. O father! how different appear the things of life on the threshold of the tomb! Tell my poor sister, whose bridegroom I killed, that I commend her to another and immortal One, who will never deceive her. Tell Pedro that I know he has forgiven me, as did his son, and that I carry this consolation to the grave, and my gratitude to God. Tell Rita that I lived and died loving her, and that, if I had lived, I never would have reminded her of the past, since she has repented of it. Ask my mother-in-law, who is so good, to recommend me to God . . . . and my poor children . . . my orphans . . . . Oh! if it were possible that they might never know . . . . the fate of their father . . . . who . . . . blesses them . . ."
Here his bursting heart found vent in sobs.
The priest who heard him, convinced of the innocence of his heart, seeing how he had been surprised into crime by all that exasperates and blinds the reason of a husband, a brother, and a brave man, and forced into an evil life by circumstances, necessity, and his natural want of firmness, felt as one who without means or power to save it sees a fair vessel dashing to pieces at his feet.
Rita's constant and energetic movements to discover the whereabouts of Perico, whose pardon, with the assistance of charitable souls, she had obtained from the king, brought her, with her mother, that day to Seville. Attempting to pass the plaza of San Francisco they encountered the great crowd which had gathered there, and, asking the cause of the tumult, were shown the scaffold. They would have retired, but could not for the press behind them.
One of the condemned is approaching; all burst into exclamations of pity--"Poor boy! This is the one they call 'Perico the Sad;' they say that his wife, a good-for-nothing, was the ruin of him."
Rita's heart beats violently--the criminal passes--she sees--she recognizes him. A shriek, another such was never uttered, rends the air--heard in all the market-place.
Perico stops: "Father," he says, "it is she! it is Rita!"
"My son," replies the priest, "think only of God, in whose presence you are going to appear, contrite, reconciled, and happy, carrying with you your expiation."
"Father, if I could only see her before I die?"
"My son, think of the bitter punishment and of the glorious illumination you are going to receive from man, who is the instrument of God in your destiny." Perico wishes to turn "Forward!" orders the sergeant.
He mounts the scaffold and kneels to the spiritual father, who with a calm face, but a heart sorely oppressed, blesses him. He kisses the crucifix, that other scaffold, upon which the Man-God expiated the sins of others, still turning his eyes toward the place from which the voice sounded that pierced his heart; seats himself upon the bench; the executioner, who stands behind him, places the garrote around his neck; the priest intones the creed; the executioner turns the screw, and a simultaneous cry, "Ave Maria purissima!" sounds in the plaza. With this invocation to the Mother of God, humanity takes leave of the condemned at the moment that he is separated from it by the hand of the law.
The executioner covers the face of the victim with a black cloth, and the black shadow of the wings of death falls upon the hushed multitude.
Some compassionate persons carried Rita away senseless. Her situation was terrible beyond expression. The convulsions which shook her left her but few moments of consciousness, and in these moments she gave way to her despair in a way so frightful that they were obliged to hold her as if she had been mad. For some days it was impossible to move her. At length her relatives brought a cart to take her away. They laid her in it, upon a mattress, but not one of them would accompany her for shame. Maria went alone with her child, sustaining her head upon her lap. Rita's long black hair fell around her like a veil, covering her from the glances of the indiscreet and curious. "There goes," they said, as they saw her pass, "the wife of the criminal, who by her indiscretion sent him to the scaffold." But the oxen did not hasten their deliberate steps. It seemed as if they also had a mission to fulfil, in prolonging the punishment of reprobation to her who hid provoked it with so much audacity. Maria went like a resigned martyr. Her gentle heart had been made as it were elastic, in order to contain without bursting an immensity of suffering. From time to time Rita shuddered and broke into lamentations, pressing convulsively her mother's knees. The latter said nothing, for even she found no words of consolation for such grief.
They reached the village as night was coming on. The cart stopped before their house, and Rita was lifted out.
She sees a window wide open in her mother-in-law's house; through this window an unusual light is shining. She breaks away from the arms that sustain her and rushes to the grating. In the middle of the room which she inhabited in happy times, stands a bier. Four wax candles throw their solemn light upon the calm form of Elvira. She is as white as her shroud; her hands are crossed, and through her right arm passes a palm branch--emblem consecrated to virginity. Thus in simple grace, and in the attitude of prayer, lies the pious village maiden.
In the front part of that melancholy room were still seen the withered plants which on a happier day had formed the mimic Bethlehem. At the extremity of the room sits Anna, as pale and motionless as the corpse itself. On one side of her is Pedro, and on the other the priest who accompanied Perico to the scaffold.
Years after the events we have related, the Marquis of ---- went to spend some days at one of the haciendas of Dos-Hermanas. One evening, when he was returning from the estate of a relative, he noticed as he passed near an olive-tree that the overseer and the guard who accompanied him uncovered their heads. He glanced upward, and saw nailed to the tree a red cross. "Has there been a murder in this quiet place?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," answered the guard, "here was killed the handsomest and bravest youth that ever trod Dos-Hermanas."
"And the murderer," added the overseer, "was the best and most honorable young man of the place."
"But how was that?" questioned the marquis.
"Through wine and women, sir, the cause of all misfortunes," replied the guard.
And as they went along they told the story we have repeated, with all its circumstances and details.
"Do any of the family still live in the place?" asked the marquis, extremely interested in the recital.
"Uncle Pedro died that year; Perico's wife would have let herself die of grief, but the priest that assisted her husband persuaded her to try to live to fulfil the will of God and her husband, by taking care of her children; but to stay here where every one knew and loved her husband, she must have had a brazen face indeed; she went with her mother to the sierra, where they had relatives. One who came from there awhile since, and had seen her, says that she does not look like the same person. The tears have worn furrows in her cheeks; she is as thin as the scythe of death, and her health is destroyed. Poor aunt Anna died only the day before yesterday. She looked like a shadow, and walked bent as if she were seeking her grave as a bed of rest."
They had now reached the village, and as they were passing a large gloomy building, the overseer said, "This is her house."
The marquis paused a moment, and then entered. An old woman, a relation of the deceased, lived alone in the sad and empty house, over which, at that instant, the moon cast a white shroud.
"How these vines are dying!" said the marquis.
"They were not so," answered the woman, "when that poor dear child took care of them. They used to be covered with flowers that flourished like daughters under the hand of a mother. But she closed her eyes, never again to open them in this world, the day she heard of her brother's fate."
"Oh!" exclaimed the gentleman, "what a pity! this magnificent orange-tree is dead."
"Yes; it is older than the world, sir, and was used to a great deal of petting and care. After poor Anna lost her children, neither she nor any one else minded it, and it withered."
"And this dog?" asked the marquis, seeing a dog, old and blind, lying in one comer.
"The poor Melampo, from the time he lost his master he grew melancholy and blind. Anna, before she died, begged me to take care of him; it was almost the only thing the dear soul spoke of; but there will be no need; when they took away her corpse he began to howl, and since then he will not eat." The marquis drew nearer. Melampo was dead.
From The Month.
BURIED ALIVE.
"It may be asserted without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well calculated to inspire the supremeness of bodily and mental distress as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs; the stifling fumes of the damp earth; the clinging to the death-garments; the rigid embrace of the narrow house; the blackness of the absolute night; the silence like a sea that overwhelms; the unseen but palpable presence of the conqueror worm--these things, with thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us, if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed; that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead--these considerations, I say, carry into the heart which still palpitates a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil." [Footnote 187]
[Footnote 187: E.A. Poe's "Premature Burial.">[
I have chosen this sentence from a writer whose forte is the terrible and mysterious for my introduction, because it sums up, in a few expressive words, the thoughts which arise in our minds on hearing or reading the words "Buried Alive." To avert so fearful a doom from a fellow-creature would surely be worth any trouble; and yet it is to be feared that the very horror which the thought inspires causes most of us to turn aside from it, and to accept the comfortable doctrine that such things are not done now, whatever may have formerly been the case. Were this true, I should not feel justified in bringing before the readers of the "Month" a ghastly subject, which could be acceptable only to a morbid curiosity; but it is unfortunately but too certain that persons are now and then buried alive, and that, therefore, this fate may be possibly our own. The subject is one which naturally excites more attention abroad; for in England the custom of keeping deceased relatives above ground for many days after their death, has long prevailed, and incurs the opposite danger of injuring the health of the survivors who thus indulge their grief. We believe no important work has ever been published in this country on the subject; for Dr. Hawe's pamphlet is not up to the present standard of medical information, and contains instances of very doubtful authenticity. The tales of premature interment which can be collected in conversation, or occasionally noticed in the public journals, are not very numerous; few of them are circumstantial enough to have any scientific interest; and some prove the supposed fact by the hair or nails having grown, and the body having moved when in its coffin-- things which are well known to happen now and then after death has undoubtedly taken place, and being therefore no proofs at all. After examination, I have, then, come to the conclusion that no estimate of the frequency of premature interment can be obtained. Indeed, the only statistics which we possess are from Germany, and they are not very reassuring. In some of the largest towns of that country, mortuary chambers (in which the dead are placed for some days before burial) have long been established; and we learn from a report of one in Berlin, that in the space of only thirty-months ten people, who had been supposed dead, were there found to be alive, and thus saved from true death [{806}] in its most horrible form. But in France and Italy, especially during the summer months, the dead are buried so very early that fears are frequently entertained. In France, indeed, the law prescribes a delay of twenty-four hours after death before interment, and also requires a certificate of death from an inspector, who in large towns is usually a physician with no other employment (le médecin des morts;) but so many instances of carelessness and of incapacity on the part of the country inspectors have been noticed, that the Chamber of Peers, during Louis Philippe's reign, and lately the Senate of the Empire, have received many petitions praying for an inquiry, and for further precautions. To these the answer has generally been, that the existing law provides sufficient safeguards; and in this the Senate only followed the prevailing opinion of men of science in France.
For, some years ago, Dr. Manni, a professor in the University of Rome, offered a prize of 15,000 francs, to be given by the French Academy of Sciences to the author of the best essay on the signs of death and the means to be taken to prevent premature interment. The prize was obtained in 1849 by M. Bouchut, an eminent physician in Paris, who, after a very detailed examination of the question, came to these two conclusions: first, that when the action of the heart could be no longer heard by means of the stethoscope, death was certain; and secondly, that not a single case of interment before death has ever been clearly and satisfactorily made out: and the learned body, who awarded the prize to him, entirely assented to these opinions. Since that time, however, cases have been quoted, by some French doctors of note, in which the action of the heart could not be detected, and yet life was in the end restored. Their observations have been summed up in a pamphlet by M. Jozat. This gave a fresh impulse to the subject; and on the 27th of February last, M. de Courvol presented a petition to the Senate of the same tenor as those mentioned above. This would have received the same answer as they did, and the matter would have been again shelved, if several of the senators present had not quoted instances which had fallen under their own observation, and in which death was escaped only by some happy accident. The most remarkable of these was narrated by Cardinal Donnet, as having happened to himself; and his story was copied into most English newspapers at the time. It is, however, so much to the purpose of this paper, that I make no apology for quoting it in his own words:
"In 1826, a young priest was suddenly struck down, unconscious, in the pulpit of a crowded cathedral where he was preaching. The funeral knell was soon after tolled, and a physician declared him to be certainly dead, and obtained leave for his burial next day. The bishop of the cathedral where this event had occurred, had recited the 'De Profundis' by the side of the bier; the coffin was being already prepared. Night was approaching; and the young priest, who heard all these preparations, suffered agonies. He was only twenty-eight years old, and in perfect health. At last he distinguished the voice of a friend of his childhood; this caused him to make a superhuman effort, and produced the wonderful result of enabling him to speak. The next day he was able to preach again."
This remarkable account, coming almost from the grave, produced a very great impression; and, as is not unusual in deliberative assemblies, the Senate yielded to striking individual cases what it had before refused to argument, forwarding the petition to the Minister of the Interior, and so implying that it considered the existing law insufficient. The plan which finds most favor in France is the establishment of "mortuary houses," like those in Germany. Although some of the highest authorities in [{807}] France are opposed to them, there can be no doubt, if the statistics quoted above are to be believed, that they would be the means of saving many lives, especially in cases where (as in hotels and lodging-houses) the funeral is now hurried as much as possible. The only precautions which need be taken in England are of a simple kind, and will be more evident after the description I shall now proceed to give of the two diseased states which most nearly simulate death.
In the first of these, called catalepsy, the patient lies immovable and apparently unconscious; the limbs are rigid and cold; the eyes are fixed, sometimes remaining open; and the jaw sometimes drops. But the resemblance to death goes no farther; the face has not a corpse-like expression; although the limbs are cold, the head continues to be warm, or is even warmer than when in the usual state; the pupils are never completely dilated, and are, sometimes at least, contracted by exposure to light. The pulse and breathing, although slow and irregular, can always be noticed; and the muscles are so far stiffened as to keep the limbs, during the whole course of the attack, in the position (however constrained and inconvenient) in which they chance to be at the time of seizure, or may be placed in by bystanders during the fit. This state of the muscular system is a decisive proof that the case is one of catalepsy.
Were this rare and curious disease the only cause of error, the physician called upon to discern in a given case between life and death would have a comparatively easy task; but there is a still rarer condition, which gives rise to most of the lamentable mistakes that are made; the state of trance or prolonged syncope, is a far more perfect counterfeit of death. The patient is motionless, and apparently unconscious, although he is usually aware of all that is passing around him; the pulsation of the heart and arteries, and the breathing gradually diminish in force and frequency, until they become at last quite imperceptible; the whole surface of the body grows cold; and all this may last even for many days. How is one in such a condition known not to be dead? In the first place, it is noticed that this disease is rare in a previously healthy person; it has been generally preceded by some cause producing great weakness, (especially long-continued fevers, great loss of blood, severe mental affliction, or bodily pain.) It almost invariably, too, occurs suddenly, without any preparation, and of course without the signs which immediately precede death.
Sometimes mere inspection will convince the physician that the person is still alive. Thus, the face, although fixed, may not have the look of death; the mouth may be firmly closed, the eye not glazed, and the pupil not entirely dilated. Supposing, however, that every one of these signs of life is absent, and that the pulse and breathing are imperceptible by the ordinary means of observation, careful examination of the chest with a stethoscope will detect the heart-sounds, if life be not quite extinct, in almost every case. I dare not, in view of the cases cited by M. Jozat, say that absence of the heart-sounds in this state never occurs; but all medical men will agree with me that it must be exceedingly rare. It also seems to me probable that, in the cases on which M. Jozat relies, the movements of the heart were so few and far between that the chest happened to be ausculted only during the intervals; at any rate, it would of course be advisable to make frequent and prolonged examinations before deciding that no sound could be heard. The late Dr. Hope suggested that the second sound of the heart might be detected, although the first was quite inaudible; but this is merely theoretical. Again, although the surface of the body be quite cold, it is probable that a thermometer introduced far into the mouth would show that some internal warmth [{808}] remained in every case of trance. At a variable time after death the muscles lose their "irritability," (that is, their power of contracting under galvanic stimulation;) and this change is speedily followed by another--the stiffness which is noticed all over the body. It is to be remembered that loss of muscular irritability, and rigidity of the whole body, may both be noticed and yet the person be alive; still, if these two symptoms are not present at first, and only appear soon after supposed death, they will afford strong presumption that the person is dead; which will be strengthened if the skin be slightly burned, and yet no bleb forms in consequence.
Every one, however, of the signs enumerated is open to exceptions; although, of course, the concurrence of many, or of all, tending in the same direction, will make death or life almost certain; but the only absolutely conclusive evidence of death is putrefaction, which is sometimes much delayed by the previous emaciation of the deceased, or by cold dry weather, but which sooner or later removes all doubt. The first indications of decay are in the eyeball, which becomes flaccid, and in the discoloration of the skin of the trunk; its later ones are well known to every one. One M. Mangin (who contributed a notice of this subject to the "Correspondant" for March 25th last, to which I am indebted for several facts I have mentioned) supposes that the buzzing, humming noise which is heard over all the body of a living person would furnish a certain means of distinguishing real from apparent death. He does not seem to be aware that M. Collongues, the principal authority for what is called "dynamoscopy," has found that this noise is absent in some cases of catalepsy and trance, for which it is proposed as a test. Certain authorities, both in England and France, have thought that microscopal examination of the blood would be decisive; but unfortunately irregularity in shape and indentation of the red disks (on which they would rely) occur sometimes during life, and are only among the earliest signs of putrefaction after death.
These, as far as I know« are the only means which science has hitherto suggested for distinguishing a living body from a corpse; and we have seen that none of them, save putrefaction, are invariably certain. In a doubtful case, therefore, time should always be allowed for this change to take place, so that the body may be interred in perfect security. If this is done under the direction of a medical attendant of ordinary information, relatives and friends may be convinced that no mistake is possible; and their plain duty is to urge this salutary delay in the very few cases where it can possibly be required.
It is particularly important to urge this delay, when necessary, in the case of persons who have apparently died of some contagious disease, and who might otherwise have been buried alive. It is indeed, much to be feared that persons in the collapse stage of cholera have been sometimes buried as dead; especially (Cardinal Donnet remarks) when they are attacked in hotels or lodgings, where a death from such a cause would be particularly prejudicial.
M. Mangin mentions one such case of a medical student in Paris, who apparently died of cholera in 1832, and for whose funeral all preparations were made, when a friend applied moxas to the spine. He recovered consciousness at once, and survived many years; and there is something grimly amusing in reading that he told the narrator: "Je me suis chauffé avec le bois de mon cercueil!" Those, again, who have read Mr. Maguire's "Life of Father Mathew," will not soon forget his graphic description of a similar case, in which Father Mathew rescued a young man from the hospital dead-house during the same epidemic at Cork, just as he was being wrapped in a tarred sheet and placed in his coffin.
Poe, in the tale from which I have quoted above, gives an instance of burial during typhus fever, probably in one of the long periods of unconsciousness and immobility occasionally occurring in that disease. The unfortunate man remained in the grave for two days, when his body was disinterred by the "body-snatchers," for the purpose of enabling his medical attendants to make a post-mortem examination. A casual application of the galvanic current revived him, and he was soon after restored to his friends, alive and in good health. This is said by Poe to have happened to a Mr. Edward Stapleton, a London solicitor, in 1831. I have been unable to obtain any verification of this marvel, but give it for what it may be worth.
It is very remarkable that the state of prolonged syncope, or trance, can sometimes be produced by a mere effort of the will. One of the best-described cases is given by St. Augustine. [Footnote 188] It is that of a priest named Restitutus, who used frequently, in order to satisfy the curiosity of friends, to make himself totally immovable, and apparently unconscious, so that he did not feel any pricking, pinching, or even burning; nor did he appear to breathe at all. He used afterward to say that "he could hear during the attack what was said very loud by bystanders, as if from afar." He brought on the attack "ad imitatas quasi lamentantis cujuslibet voces;" a sentence which is unfortunately of rather uncertain meaning. Another case is recorded by Dr. Cheyne, a fashionable Bath physician of the last century. A patient of his, one Colonel Townsend, in order to convince Dr. Cheyne's incredulity, one day voluntarily induced this state of death-like trance "by composing himself as if to sleep." He then appeared perfectly dead; and neither Dr. Cheyne nor another physician. Dr. Bayard, nor the apothecary in attendance, could detect any pulsation at the heart or wrist, or any breathing whatever. They were just about to give him up for dead, when, at the end of half an hour, he gradually recovered.
[Footnote 188: "De Civ. Dei," xiv. cap. 24. ]
But these performances are quite thrown into the shade by those of certain fakeers in India. Mr. Braid, in his very interesting "Observations on Trance, or Human Hybernation," collected several of these almost incredible tales from British officers, who spoke as having been themselves eye-witnesses of them in India. In the most wonderful of them Sir Claude Wade (formerly Resident at the court of Runjeet Singh) says that he saw a fakeer buried in an underground vault for six weeks: the body had been twice dug up by Runjeet Singh during this period, and found in the same position as when first buried. In another case, Lieutenant Boileau (in his "Narrative of a Journey in Rajwarra in 1835") relates that he saw a man buried for ten days in a grave lined with masonry and covered with large slabs of stone; and the fakeer declared his readiness to be left in the tomb for a twelvemonth. In all these cases it is said that the body, when first disinterred, was like a corpse, and no pulse could be detected at the heart or the wrist; but warmth to the head and friction of the body soon revived the bold experimenter. Supposing that the watch (which was carefully kept up during each of these curious interments) was not eluded by some of the jugglery in which Indians excel, we have here proofs that the state of trance cannot only be voluntarily induced, but prolonged over a very long time.
The rationale of such phenomena is not very difficult to comprehend. St. Augustine was undoubtedly right when he explained the case that fell under his own observation by the supposition that some persons have a remarkable and unusual power of the will over the action of the heart. Dr. Carpenter suggests that the state of syncope could be kept up much longer [{810}] in a vault in a tropical climate, where the body would not lose too much of its natural heat, than in more temperate countries; and Mr. Braid compares this condition to the slowness of respiration and circulation during winter in hybernating animals. But whatever may be the explanation, I cannot at least be accused of digression in ending this gloomy paper with an account of men who are voluntarily buried alive.
Translated from Le Correspondant.
A CELTIC LEGEND.--HERVÉ.
TO THE MEMORY OF M. AUGUSTIN THIERRY.
BY H. DE LA VILLEMARQUÉ.
I was one day walking in the country with a book in my hand. It was in a district of that land where La Fontaine has said, "fate sends men when it wishes to make them mad." Fate had not, however, sent me there in order to make me mad. I found, on the contrary, in the charming scenes which on all sides presented themselves to my view, and in the original population which surrounded me, a thousand reasons for not sharing the sentiment of the morose narrator of fables. A peasant accosted me in the familiar but at the same time respectful style habitual to those of that country, and, pointing to my book with his finger:
"Is it the Lives of the Saints," he said to me, "'that you are reading there?"
A little surprised at this address, which, however, by no means explained my reading, I remained silent, thinking of this opinion of the Breton peasants, according to whom the "Lives of the Saints" is the usual reading of all those who know how to read; and, as my interlocutor repeated his question,
"Well, yes," I replied, to humor his thought, "there is sometimes mention made of the saints in this book."
"And what one's life are you reading now?" he continued obstinately.
I mentioned at random the name of some saint, and thought I had quieted his curiosity, but I had not satisfied his faith.
"What was he good for?" he asked.
For an instant I stopped short; what reply to offer to a man who judged the saints by their practical utility? I turned upon him: "And your own patron," I replied, "what maladies does he care?"
"Oh! a great number," he said; "those of men as well as those of animals. Although during his life he was only a poor blind singer, he has a beautiful place in paradise, I assure you. The day he entered heaven the sky was all illuminated." And, accompanying it with commentaries, he chanted for me the legend of the patron of his parish.
I knew it already by Latin and French publications; but I was well pleased to collect it fresh from the living spring of popular tradition. By the aid of this later source and of the written record, I have reconstructed the account about to be read. It presents, if I do not deceive myself, a somewhat interesting page in the history of Christian civilization in Armorica, in the sixth century; so judged the great historian, my teacher and my friend, to whom I dedicate it. Moral truth shines through all the legend as a light shines through a veil. [Footnote 189]
[Footnote 189: The most ancient compilation of this legend, written six hundred years after the death of Saint Hervé, which is placed on the 22d June in the year 568, exists in the Imperial Library, in the portfolio of the "Blanc-Manteaux." No 38, p. 851: the two more modern are, one of P. Albert le Grand, who has taken for his model Jacques de Voragine; the other by Dom Lobineau, who has fallen into the contrary extreme.]
I.
It was the custom of the Frank kings to have a large number of poets and musicians at their court; they often had them come from foreign countries, taking pleasure, mingled with a barbarous pride, in listening to verses sung in their honor, of which they understood not a word. Among them were seen Italians, Greeks, and even Britons, who, uniting their discordant voices with the singers of the German race, emulated each other in flattering the not critical ears of the Merovingian princes. Welcomed to their palace, after having been driven from his own country by the Lombards, the Italian Fortunatus has preserved for us recollections of these singular concerts at which, lyre in hand, he performed his part while "the Barbarian," he says, "added the harp, the Greek the instrument of Homer, and the Briton the Celtic rote." The rote had the same fate as the lyre; it sought in Gaul an asylum from the invaders of the British Isle, of whom it might be said with equal truth as by the Italian poet of the conquerors of his country, that they did not know the difference between the gabble of the goose and the song of the swan. The Merovingian kings piqued themselves on having more taste.
Among the Britons who took refuge with them, and who continued to play in Gaul nearly the same part that they played in the dwellings of their native chiefs, there was a young man, named Hyvarnion. This name, which signifies just judgment, had been given him in his own country on the following occasion: He was in a school where he was only known as the petit savant, and had for his teacher one of the sages of the British nation, both monk and poet, named Kadok, now known in Armorica as Saint Cado. At the end of the fifth century this successor of the last Latin rhetors of Albion, instructed the young islanders in grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, and music, mingling, as it appears, with the methods of instruction transmitted by classic antiquity, the traditions of the ancient Druids. The master disputed one day with his little scholar after the manner of the Druids, the subject of debate being: What are the eighteen most beautiful moral virtues? Kadok indicated eighteen, but he purposely omitted the principal, wishing to leave to his pupil the pleasure of finding them out for himself.
"For my part," said the scholar, "I believe that he possesses the eighteen virtues par excellence, who is strong in trials and in tribulations; gentle in the midst of suffering; energetic in execution; modest in glory and in prosperity; humble in conduct; persistent in good resolutions; firm in toil and in difficulties; eager for instruction; generous in words, in deeds, and in thoughts; reconciler of quarrels; gracious in his manners and affable in his house; on good terms with his neighbors; pure in body and in thought; just in words and deeds; regular in his manners; but above all, charitable to the poor and afflicted."
"Thine the prize!" cried Kadok, "thou hast spoken better than I."
"Not so," replied the petit savant, "not so; I wished to carry it over thee, and thou hast given a proof of humility; thou art the wiser, and thine the palm." [Footnote 190]
[Footnote 190: "Myvyrian archaeology of Wales," iii. p. 45.]
This just judgment brought good fortune to the young scholar. It procured for him the fine name by which he was afterward designated, and under which he is presented to us in the Armorican legends.
Once passed over to the continent, Hyvarnion became henceforth only a vague remembrance in the minds of the islanders. His countrymen knew very little of his history, and it may be believed that he would have been wholly forgotten had not a Cambrian poet consecrated to him three verses recalling the memorable sayings of the great men of his nation.
"Hast thou heard," said he, "what sang the petit savant seated at table with the bards?"
"The man with a pure heart has a joyous countenance."
The table which is here mentioned is that of the Frank king Childebert. Hyvarnion sat there for four years, probably from the year 513 to the year 517. In the midst of the debaucheries and the scandals of that court he appeared calm and serene in conscience and in countenance, and like the children in the furnace, he sang. His songs and his verses rendered him agreeable to the king, says a hagiographer who charitably claims that the bard "merited the esteem of the king even more by his virtues than by his talents." Whatever might be the esteem of the murderer of the sons of Chlodimer for the virtues of the poet of his court, Childebert showed himself as generous to him as were the island chiefs to their household minstrels. But not precious stuffs, nor gold, nor mead, the three gifts most dear to a poet, could retain in the court of Paris a young man in whose eyes purity of soul and of body, regularity of manners, and justice were among the most beautiful of virtues.
Under pretext of returning to his own country, where a brilliant and decisive victory of Arthur over the Saxons had restored security, he asked permission of the king to leave him. He departed loaded with presents, even carrying, we are assured, a letter to Kon-Mor, or great chief, who governed Armorica in the name of Childebert, in which the king ordered that a ship should be placed at the service of the British bard.
Hyvarnion had been three days at the court of the Frank officer, and the ship, which was to conduct him to the British isle was ready to sail, when three dreams, followed by a meeting which he had probably made after his arrival in Armorica, prevented his embarkation. A young girl of the country, as remarkable for her beauty as for her talent for poetry and music, appeared to him in his sleep. Seated on the border of a fountain she sang in a voice so sweet that it pierced his heart. Somewhat troubled on awaking, he drove away the dangerous and too charming recollection; but the following night, the same young girl, more beautiful still, if possible, and singing even more sweetly than before, appeared to him a second time. "Then," says an author, "he seriously feared that it was some wile or snare of the spirit of fornication," and the night coming, he prayed the Lord to deliver him from this dream, if it came not from him. "If on the contrary, it is thou who dost send it to me," said he, "let me know clearly what it is thou wouldst that I should do."
And he sought his bed. But behold! scarcely had he slept than he had a third dream. He saw a young man surrounded with light, who entered his room and thus spoke to him: "Fear not to take for your wife her whom you have seen seated on the border of the fountain, and whom you will see again. Like you, she is pure and chaste, and God will bless your love."
The Frank officer to whom the bard related his dream, wished, without doubt, to be agreeable to one recommended by the king, and took upon himself to realize the prophecy. He proposed a hunting party to the young man, where, he said, he would meet a certain marvellous hare, called the silver hare, but with the secret purpose of contriving a meeting with the [{813}] young girl of his dream. His hope was not deceived. As they entered the forest where lodged the pretended silver hare, they heard a voice singing in the distance. The young man trembled and reined up his horse. "I hear," said he, "I hear the voice singing which I heard last night."
Without replying to him the royal officer turned himself toward the part of the forest whence the voice proceeded, and following a footpath which wound along the side of a stream, they reached a spring, near to which a young girl was occupied in gathering simples.
"The young girl sat by the fountain," says a poet. "White was her dress, and rosy her face.
"So white her dress, so rosy her face, that she seemed an eglantine flower blooming in the snow.
"And she did naught but sing: 'Although I am, alas! but a poor iris on the banks of the water, they call me its Little Queen.
"The Lord Count said to the young girl as he approached her, 'I salute you, Little Queen of the Fountain. How gaily thou dost sing, and how fair thou art!
"'How fair thou art, and how gaily thou dost sing. What flowers are those you gather there?'
"'I am not fair, I sing not gaily, and these are not flowers that I gather;
"'These are not flowers that I gather, but different kinds of salutary plants;
"'One is good for those who are sad; for the blind, the other is good; and the third, if I can find it, is that which will cure death.'
"'Little Queen, I pray thee, give me the first of these plants.'
"'Save your grace, my Lord, I shall give it only to him whom I shall marry.'
"'Thou hast given it! Give it then,' cried the royal officer, 'Thou hast given it to this young man, who has just come to ask thee in marriage.'"
And the Little Queen of the Fountain gave to the bard, in pledge of her faith, the plant which produces gaiety. [Footnote 191]
[Footnote 191: The Breton text of the legend of Saint Hervé, in verse appears in the fifth edition of the Barsas[??] Breis, Chante populaires de la Bretagne. ]
If we may credit the legend, it was even in the same mind that Rivanone, as she was called, went to the fountain; for she also had a dream the preceding night, a dream altogether like the bard's. She herself confessed it, and if she had not avowed it, we could divine it, "Those who love, have they not dreams?" An qui amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? Seeing in this a certain proof of the will of heaven, the Frank count brought the brother of Rivanone, an Armorican chief, in whose manor the young girl had lived since the death of her father and mother, and having related to him all that had passed, he demanded of him his sister in marriage for the favorite of the king.
Thus was settled this well-assorted union, and the wedding was celebrated at the court of the Frank count.
Tradition has described it in a manner almost epic. The small as well as the great, the poor as well as the rich, were guests at the feast; churchmen and warriors, magistrates and common people, arrived there from all sides. Neither wine, nor hydromel, drawn from casks, was wanting to the guests. Two hundred hogs were immolated, and two hundred fat bulls, two hundred heifers, and one hundred roebucks, two hundred buffalos, one hundred black, one hundred white, and their skins divided among the guests. A hundred robes of white wool were given to the priests, one hundred collars of gold to the valiant warriors, and blue mantles without number to the ladies. The poor had also their part; there was for them a hundred new suits; they could not receive less at the marriage of a poet who placed duty to them at the head of the most beautiful virtues. But in order worthily to do him honor for himself--in order properly to celebrate the union of the Armorican muse [{814}] with the genius of the island bards--a hundred musicians did not seem too many--a hundred musicians who from their high seats played for fifteen days in the court of the count. In order to complete this by an act destined to crown the glory of the young couple, we are assured the king of the bards of the sixth century, the last of the Druids, the famous Meri, finally celebrated the marriage.
Be this as it may, in regard to an honor which another popular tradition appears to claim with more reason for the heroes of another legend of the same century, the wedding at last at an end, the bride, accompanied by a numerous suite, was conducted with her husband to the manor of her brother, and if the Armorican customs of our days already existed at that epoch, the minstrels at the wedding played on their way a tender and melancholy air, named the Air of the Evening before the Festival, which always brought tears to the eyelids of the bride.
"God console the inconsolable heart, the heart of the girl on her wedding night."
It is said that Rivanone shed several tears in the midst of her joy. Had she not for ever bid adieu to the sweet and simple girlish beliefs which had surrounded her? to her dear fountain, on the banks of which her companions the fairies danced at night in white robes, with flowers in their hair, in honor of the new moon? to those graceful dances which she herself, perhaps, had led, and to her songs in the wood? to her salutary plants less brilliant but more useful and more durable than flowers? to the herb which causes the union of hearts and produces joy, which, wet in the waters of the fountain by a virgin hand, she had shaken upon the brow of the man whom she was to take for her husband? to the golden herb which spreads light, and in opening the eyes of the body and the mind, opens to the knowledge of things of the future? finally, had she not renounced the search for the plant called the herb of death, which would be better named the herb of life, because those die not who once have found it?
But no! "God console the inconsolable heart, the heart of the girl on her wedding night!" The spring of the fountain will cease not to flow; the charming apparitions will desert not its borders; there shall be ever seen there gliding through the night a luminous shadow of which the moon will be but an imperfect image--the shadow of that immaculate Virgin whom the Druids seem to have prophesied when they raised an altar to her under the name of the Virgin Mother, and the white fairies of Armorica less white, less pure than she, bending before their patroness, will sing Ave Maria!
No plant shall wither there, not the lemon-plant which produces joy, for it is at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, that it will spring henceforth; it is to Him it owes its virtue, and shall be called the herb of the cross; nor sélago which gives light, for it is from the aureole of the saints that it borrows its rays, and to discover it, it is necessary to be a saint; nor, more than all, the herb of life, for he has shown it, he has given it as a legacy to his disciples, to whom he has said; "I am the life; whosoever believeth in me shall not die."
And no more than the living spring which nourishes the herbs by its side shall be exhausted that which sustains the fruits of the Spirit; the soul shall not be stifled, it shall be purified; and for a moment bent under regrets, as a rose under the rain, the Druid muse shall be transformed and awake a Christian.
Rivanone so awoke; God had consoled the inconsolable heart, the heart of the girl on her wedding-night.
II.
God consoles in his own way; he blesses in the same. Three years after their marriage, Rivanone and Hyvarnion rocked the cradle of a crying infant whom they endeavored to put asleep with their songs. Now this infant was blind; and in remembrance of their sorrow they had named him Huervé or Hervé, that is to say, bitter or bitterness.
But, if his mother did not try upon his eyes the better appreciated virtue of the herb which should cure the blind; if she asked of her Christian faith surer remedies to give light to her son, she found, at least, at the foot of the cross, the herb which sweetens bitterness; and her husband himself without doubt recollected that he had said in his childhood that one of the most beautiful of virtues is strength in trials and tribulations.
Two years afterward this strength was even more necessary by the side of the cradle of the blind; a single hand rocked that cradle, a single voice sang there--the other voice sang in heaven. The father had already found the true plant which gives life.
With death, misery entered the house of the bard, misery all the more cruel that it had known only prosperity. It is always in this way that it comes to those who live by poesy. Happily Providence is a more charitable neighbor than the ant in the fable. He did not fail the widow of the poet who had been the friend of the poor and afflicted. It was not from the palace of the Frank count, henceforth indifferent to the fortunes of a family his master had forgotten, nor from the manor of Rivanone's brother, which she charmed no more with her songs, that assistance came. It came from that cradle, watered with tears, where slept a poor orphan. It is always from a cradle that God sends forth salvation.
"One day the orphan said to his sick mother, clasping her in his little arms: 'My own dear mother, if you love me, you will let me go to church;
"'For here am I full seven years old, and to church I have not yet been.'
"'Alas! my dear child, I cannot take you there, when I am ill on my bed.'
"'When I am ill of an illness which lasts so long that I shall be forced to go and beg for alms.'
"'You shall not go, my mother, to beg for alms; I will go for you, if you will permit me.
"'I will go with some one who will lead me, and in going I will sing.
"'I will sing your beautiful canticles, and all hearts will listen!'
"And he departed finally to seek bread for his mother who could not walk.
"Now, whatever it was, it must have been a hard heart that was not moved on the way to church;
"Seeing the little blind child of seven years without other guide than his little white dog.
"Hearing him sing, shivering, beaten by the wind and the rain, without covering on his little feet, and his teeth chattering with cold."
It was the festival of All Saints, as the legend tells us; the festival of the Dead follows it, and is prolonged during the second night of this month which the Bretons call the Month of the Dead. Having feasted the blessed, every one goes to the cemetery to pray at the tomb of his parents, to fill with holy water the hollow of their gravestone, or, according to the locality, to make libations of milk. It is said that on this night the souls from Purgatory fly through the air as crowded as the grass on the meadow; that they whirl with the leaves which the wind rolls over the fields, and that their voices mingle with the sighs of nature in mourning. Then, toward midnight, these confused voices become more and more distinct, and at each cottage door is heard this melancholy canticle.
"In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, greeting to you, people of this house, we come to you to ask your prayers.
"Good people, be not surprised that we have come to your door; it is Jesus who has sent us to wake you if you sleep.
"If there is yet pity in the world, in the name of God, aid us.
"Brothers, relatives, friends, in the name of God, hear us; in the name of God pray, pray; for the children pray not. Those whom we have nourished have long since forgotten us; those whom we have loved have left us destitute of pity."
Bands of mendicant singers, poor souls in trouble, they also, wanderers like those of the dead, go by woods and graves, to the sound of funereal bells, lending their voices to the unhappy of the other world.
The blind orphan, who, from the bed of his sick mother, went to kneel on the couch of his dead father, commenced in their company his apprenticeship as a singer, and if it is believed, as is claimed, that the chant des ames, such as it has come to us, was composed by a blind singer, under the inspiration of his father, whom he would have delivered from pain, the blind singer should be Hervé, and the inspirer Hyvarnion.
The impression which the sainted child produced on the men of his time is better founded; it has left traces in the popular imagination which have been translated into touching narratives:
"The evening of All Souls, long before the night, the child returned to his mother, after his circuit.
"And he was very tired, so tired that he could not hold himself on his feet--all the route was slippery with ice.
"So tired that he fell on his mouth, and his mouth vomited blood, blood with broken teeth."
Now these broken teeth did not give birth to furious warriors, like those of the dragon in the fable; they were changed into diamonds which shone from far in the darkness.
Such is the language of the tradition. Can we better paint the songs drawn forth by the sorrow of the son of Hyvarnion, these songs of a Christian muse which cleared away the shadows no less crowded than those of the night of All Souls?
But these shadows were not dissipated instantly; the resistance made to Christianity by the remains of Armorican paganism is not less clearly indicated in traditional recollections than by the action and influence of the little Christian singer.
As he passed the cross-roads of a village where the inhabitants have to this day preserved the sobriquet of paganiz, that is to say, heathens, he fell in the midst of a circle of young peasants, who, interrupting their dance, ran after him, hooting at him, throwing dirt upon him, and crying: "Where are you going, blind one, blind one! Where are you going, blind brawler?"
"I'm going out of this canton, because I must," replied Hervé, "but cursed be the race that comes from you." And, indeed, the little mockers, struck by the anathema, returned to the dance, and they must dance, it is said, to the end of the world, without ever resting or ever growing, becoming like those dwarfed imps whom the Armoricans adored, and whose power the Breton peasants still fear.
Nature herself, that great Celtic divinity, took the side of the imps against Hervé, while the mother of the saint, in beholding him preaching the gospel, could say with the church: "How beautiful are the feet of those who come from the mountains!" "The granite earth on which he walked, refused to carry him, tearing his naked feet, and no one," says the complaint, "no one wiped the blood from his wounds, only his white dog with his tongue, who washed the feet of the saint, and warmed them with his breath."
Then, as he had cursed the mocking spirits, the saint cursed also the stony ground which would arrest his steps, and it was rendered harder than iron; when, going, according to his promise, into a district where the rocks were such, the legend assures us, that "iron [{817}] nor steel could ever pierce them," that is to say, the inhabitants were obstinate and incorrigible barbarians, he returned to the saint who inspired and enlightened him.
"My mother, for seven or eight years I have gone over this country, and have gained nothing from these hard and cruel hearts.
"I would be in some solitary place where I should hear only songs; where every day, my mother, I should hear only the praises of God."
"Thou wouldst be a cleric, my son, to be later a priest! God be praised! How sweet it would be to me to hear you say mass!"
"It is not, my mother, to be a priest; the priest's state is a great responsibility, and it frightens my weak spirit; besides the charge of my own soul I should have the charge of other souls; but I would like far better to live my life in the depths of the forest with the monks, and to be instructed how to serve God by those who serve him."
Rivanone agreed to the wishes of her son; the forest which he chose for his retirement was inhabited by one of her uncles. Hervé sought him, while his mother asked an asylum for herself of some pious women who lived in community in another solitary place, having no intercourse with the world except with the sick and infirm to whom they were a providence.
III.
An ancient Breton ballad represents a magician going over the fields of Armorica at the dawn of day, accompanied by a black dog. I do not know what Christian voice addresses him: "Where are you going this morning with your black dog?" "I go to find the red egg, the red egg of the sea-serpent, on the edge of the river in the crevice of the rock."
Vain search! This egg, a sacred symbol to the ancient priests of Gaul and other heathen worship, had been crushed with the serpent of the Druids; the day was about to appear and put to flight the magician, darkness, and the black dog. When, on the contrary, Hervé put himself, guided by his white dog, on the way to his uncle's hermitage, the last shades of night had disappeared, the day had risen, and he was to find in the Christian school more precious talismans than the egg of the Druid serpent.
"Saint Hervé went to the school the sun encircled his brow with a circle of light, the doves sang along his road, and his white dog yelped for joy.
"Arrived at the door of the hermitage, the dog barked louder and louder, so that the hermit, hearing it, came forth to receive his niece's child.
"May God bless the orphan who comes in good faith to my school, who has sought me to be my clerk; my child, may blessings be on thy head.'" [Footnote 192]
[Footnote 192: Same Breton legend of Saint Hervé.]
This great unde of Hervé was named Gurfoed; like many other hermits he brought up the children of Armorica. Among the grammarians whom he made them learn by heart, the ecclesiastical writers indicate Martianus Capella, the author of the "Noces de Mercure et de la Philologie," of whom they make a monk, and among the subjects of his instruction they specially mention poetry and music. Music took a sufficiently high place in the schools and in the tastes of that age, as is proved by a synod assembled at Vannes in the middle of the sixth century, which believed it necessary to call the attention of the Armorican bishops to that point, and drew up an article on the necessity of adopting, in the whole province, a uniform chant. Besides, in introducing it into the Christian ceremonies, and giving it place even in the choir of the temple, the church has shown the esteem which she has for this art. Hervé perfected himself in it more and more; he even became so clever in it, observe the hagiographies, "that he took the prize from all his fellow-students."
After seven years of study passed at a distance from his mother, he wished to see her and receive new force and new light from her counsels. According to some, Gurfoed conducted him to her; according to the popular legend, she came herself to seek her son.
And she said on approaching him:
"I behold a procession of monks advancing, and I hear the voice of my son; though a thousand were singing, I should know the voice of Hervé; I behold my son dressed in gray, with a cord of hair for his belt. God be with you, my son, the clerk!"
"God be with you, my beloved mother! God is good; the mother is faithful to her son. Coming from so far to see me, although you could not walk!"
"And now that I have come, and I see you, my son, what have you to ask of me?"
"I have nothing to ask of you, my mother, but the permission to remain here to pray to God day and night, that we may meet each other in paradise."
"We shall meet in paradise or its surroundings, with the help of God, my son. When I go there you shall have warning; you shall hear the song of the angels."
"In fact," continues the French legend, "the evening of her decease and the next day, all those that were near saw a brilliant ladder by the side of her oratory, one end reaching to the skies, by which angels ascended and descended singing the most melodious motets and canticles."
The pious woman-poet, who had given to the church such a saint as Hervé, well deserved that God's angels should sing, making a festival for her last hour.
Hervé, guided by Gurfoed, arrived at the bedside of his dying mother, in time, if not to see her, (he could never see her except in heaven,) at least to receive her blessing, and to mingle his canticles with those of the pious companions of Rivanone, truly angelic choirs.
IV.
After the death of his mother, Hervé returned to the hermitage of his uncle; but Gurfoed, wishing to live a still more retired life, abandoned his dwelling, and buried himself in the forest. Aided by some pious men, who, in order to work and pray under his direction, had built their cabins by the side of his, the saint continued to hold the school of his predecessor. This school prospered; and every evening could be seen a crowd of children coming from it, who assembled there in the morning from all the manors, as well as from all the surrounding cottages; a crowd as noisy, says a poet, as a swarm of bees issuing from the hollow of an oak. The master, being blind, could not teach them their letters; but he taught them canticles, maxims in verse, religious and moral aphorisms, without omitting those precepts of pure civility, so necessary to coarse natures; and while exercising their memory he cultivated their understanding and their heart: he polished their rude manners; he endeavored, finally, to make men of them while bending their restless natures under the curb of his discipline. Lessons of wisdom were not clothed in other form in those heroic times; poetry and music, inseparable from each other, had always been considered by the ancients as necessary to cultivation, not only on account of the harmony which they produced, but for utility, instruction, and civilization of the people. Hervé in taking them for the basis of his instruction, followed, without doubt, the counsels of Aristotle. It is said that Orpheus thus civilized people by his songs. Those of Hesiod have come to us, and present us with valuable examples of that didactic poetry, the first with all nations. But though we have left us some poems of Saint Hervé, they are very few in number; the most were composed rather in his [{819}] spirit and according to his rules than by himself. They give him the honor of those aphorisms to which his name is given, which, at least, have the strong imprint of the instructive poetry of the monks; they turn upon three of the virtues which the religions principally endeavored to inculcate in their Ignorant pupils, idle and independent, as are all barbarians, namely, the love of instruction, the love of work, and the love of discipline, elements which are the strength of all civilized society.
"It is better to instruct a little child than to amass riches for him."
Saint Cado, the teacher of Hervé's father, said the same thing in other terms, "There is no wealth without study;" and he added, "There is no wisdom without science, no independence without science, no liberty, no beauty, no nobleness, no victory without science," and, giving to science its true foundation, he thus terminated his eloquent enumeration:
"No science without God."
The second axiom credited to Saint Hervé is this: "He who is idle in his youth heaps poverty on the head of his old age."
The Breton mariners have retained the third maxim of which Saint Hervé passers as the author: "The words of Hervé are words of wisdom," they say; "Who yields not to the rudder will yield to the rock." I have also seen attributed to him a moral song, widely spread in Brittany, in which, perhaps, there are several couplets of his, but in any case modernized in language and style.
"Come to me, my little children, come to me that you may hear a new song, which I have composed expressly for you. Take the greatest pains in order that you may retain it entire."
"When you wake in your bed, offer your heart to the good God, make the sign of the cross, and say, with faith, hope, and love:
"'My God, I give you my heart, my body, and my soul. Grant that I may be an honest man, or that I may die before the time.'
"When you see a raven flying, remember that the devil is as black as wicked; when you see a little white dove, remember that your angel is as gentle as white.
"Remember that God sees you like the sun in the midst of the sky; remember that God can make you bloom as the sun makes bloom the wild roses of the mountains.
"At night, before going to bed, recite your prayers; do not fail, so that a white angel will come from heaven to guard you until morning.
"Behold, dear children, the true means of living as good Christians. Put my song into practice and yon will lead a holy life."
Such lessons, where were so effectively found some of the practices which make a man strong, that is to say, Christians; where there was so much freshness and grace; where the sun, and the flowers, the birds and the angels, all the most smiling images were purposely united, captivated and charmed the young barbarians. I am no longer surprised if the legend assures us that Hervé tamed the savage beasts; if it recounts that one day he forced a thief of a fox to bring back, "without hurting her," his hen which he had carried off, and another time a robber of a wolf who had eaten up his ass--others say his dog--to serve and follow him like a spaniel. This new style of spaniel was seen in a crowd of bas-reliefs held in leash by the saints, and as elsewhere mothers threatened their children with the wolf, the Breton Mothers frightened their brats with Hervé's spaniel. Orpheus is thus represented followed by tamed tigers; and another bard, a half pagan, whom we have seen before accompanied by his black dog, is painted, running through the woods with a wolf which he calls his dear companion. Tu Lupe, care comes. The poets of the primitive times were supposed to be in a perpetual union with nature, [{820}] and to have reconquered the power, lost since leaving the Garden of Eden, of making all animals obedient to them. Hervé was considered to be endowed with the same power; but poetry and music were not the only form which the Christian gave to his charms. His true magic was prayer. See how he chanted when he was exposed to the snares or the ferocity of animals or of men:
"O God! deign to preserve me from snares, from oppression, from evil, from the fox, the wolf, and the devil."
Not more than men and wild beasts, could nature resist the force of his prayer. Somewhat troubled in his retreat, and above all in his humility, by the too noisy veneration of the Armorican chiefs, who sent their sons to him, he plunged into the forest, as had Gurfoed, seeking the hermitage, and the counsels of his former teacher; but the grass and fern had effaced the path which led there, and all Hervé's researches had been in vain, when he came to an opening in the forest where a moss-covered rock was raised up on four stones; the ruins of a cabin where the badgers had made their nests, were seen near at hand; briers, thickets of holly and thorns encumbered the ground. Before these ruins the saint, struck with a secret presentiment, prostrated himself, his arms in the form of a cross, and cried three times: "In the name of God, rock, split; in the name of God, earth, open, if you hide from me my light." His prayer was scarcely terminated when the earth trembled, the rocks split, and through the opening came a soft odor, which revealed to him the sepulchre of him whom he was seeking.
Such is the popular narrative; but, if it is intended to show his power over nature, it shows still more his humility. It is exhaled from this legend, as perfumes from the tomb of him whom he sought as his light.
I remember a song in which a kind of Druidess gives the assurance that she knows a song which can make even the earth tremble: after a frightful display of magical science, she finishes by saying, that with the help of her light, as she calls her master she is able to turn the earth in the contrary way. Here it is the pagan pride which vaunts itself; but a voice from heaven is heard, "If this world is yours, the other belongs to God!" and the sorceress was confounded. Hervé, on the contrary, who is humble, and who prays; Hervé, who speaks, not in his own name, but in the name of God, is heard and exalted. It is verifying the words of the Gospel: "And the humble shall be exalted."
As he advanced in age, the saint continued to realize this promise. We have up to this moment seen him glorified under the tatters of a vagabond singer, as well as under the poor robe of an instructor of little barbarians; we are now to see him as an agriculturist, even architect, but always all the strongest when he would wish to appear weakest in the eyes of men, always the greatest when he would wish to be the lowest.
The counsels which Hervé had gone to ask of his old teacher, he received from his bishop, a wise and holy man, who came from Britain to the country of Léon. The bishop judged him worthy to be a priest, and wished to confer upon him the ecclesiastical character; but the hermit, who from childhood had considered himself unworthy of this great responsibility, persisted in his humble sentiments, and he would consent to be promoted only to the lowest orders, to those called minor orders. It is easy to believe that his bishop induced him to definitely fix his dwelling somewhere with his disciples, and to give to the Armoricans the example of a sedentary life, of manual labor, the cultivation of the earth, and building, all things which are at the foundation of all society, and which the barbarians little liked; for he went to work to seek a place where he could establish a small colony.
V.
About half a century before, another bard also blind, and his hair whitened by age, journeyed in Armorica from canton to canton, seated on a small horse from the mountains, which a child led by the bridle. He sought, like Hervé, a field to cultivate and in which he could build. Knowing what herbs were produced by good ground, and what herbs by bad ground, he asked from time to time of his guide:
"Seest thou the green clover?"
And always the child replied:
"I see only the fox-glove blossoms." For at that epoch, Armorica was a wild country.
"Well, then, we will go farther," replied the old man.
And the little horse went on his way. At last the child cried out:
"Father, I see the clover blooming."
And he stopped. The old man dismounted, and seating himself on a stone, in the sun, he sang the songs of labor in the fields, and of their culture in different seasons. This agricultural bard was invested with a venerated character by the ancient Bretons. They regarded him as a pillar of social existence; but his heart, open to the cultivation of nature, was closed to the love of humanity. With one of his brethren he said willingly: "I do not plough the earth without shedding blood on it." He thirsted for the blood of Christian monks and priests, and he offered it with joy as sacrifice to the earth. To the wisest lessons in agriculture he added the most ferocious predictions, "The followers of Christ shall be tracked; they shall be hunted like wild beasts, they shall die in bands and by battalions on the mountain. The wheel of the mill grinds fine; the blood of the monks will serve as water."
Scarcely sixty years had rolled away, and these same monks whom the bard cursed as usurpers of the Celtic harp and as stealers of the children of the Bretons, advanced peaceably over the ruins of a religion of which he was the last minister, ready to shed blood also, but their own; ready to perform prodigies, but of intelligence and of love. Their chief was not on horseback, he walked with bare feet, (he went always unshod, says his historian,) and having journeyed for a long time, he spoke thus to his disciples:
"Know, my brothers, it wearies me to be always running and wandering in this way; pray to God that he will reveal to us some place in which we can live to serve him for the rest of our days."
They all commenced to pray, and behold a voice was heard saying: "Go even toward the east, and where I shall three times tell thee to rest, there thou wilt dwell." They commenced then on the road to the east, and when they had gone very far, having found a field filled with high green wheat, they sat down in its shade. Now, as he was thus reposing, a voice was heard which said three times: "Make your dwelling here." Filled with gratitude, they knelt to thank God, and being thirsty with the heat and the travel, the saint by his prayers obtained a fresh fountain.
But the possession of the land was not easy to obtain from the avaricious proprietor, whom the French legend charitably calls "an honest man." Hervé demanded of him, however, only a little corner in which to erect a small monastery.
"Bless my soul, bless my soul!" cried the owner, "but my wheat is still all green, and so if you cut it now it will be lost."
"No, no," said Saint Hervé, "it shall not be so, for as much wheat as I cut now so much will I render to you ripe and in the sack at harvest time."
To this he agreed, and commenced to cut down the wheat, which he tied in bundles and sheafs and laid apart; and God so favored them, that at the time of the harvest, these sheafs which had been cut all green, not only became ripe, but had blossomed and so multiplied that where there had been one there were now two. The owner of the field seeing this, gave thanks to God, who had sent these holy men to him, and gave the whole field to the saint. [Footnote 193]
[Footnote 193: Albert le Grand.]
Thus the toil and intelligence of the monks made the earth render double the ordinary crops, and, conquered by such miracles, the barbarians, who, moreover, did not lose anything, gave willingly all that was asked of them.
The good religious from whom I have borrowed the translation of the preceding narrative even assures us that the proprietor went so far as to promise Hervé to build him a beautiful church at his own expense. This new miracle, however, was only half carried out; for we see Hervé, once the land had been conceded to him, going to work with his disciples to procure the wood necessary for the construction of his church and convent. He made a collection for this end, not only in the country of Léon, but even in the mountains of Aiez, and in Cornwall, visiting the manors of the chiefs and the richest monasteries.
Everywhere, it is said, he was well received, thanks to the benefits that he spread along his passage, and all the nobles to whom he applied caused as many oaks to be cut down for him in their forests, as he desired. It is, however, probable, notwithstanding the assertions of the legendaries, that he found many but little disposed to aid in the building of a Christian church, and that all those whom he visited did not show themselves very eager to cut down the trees, so venerated in Armorica; for in the following century, a council held at Nantes near the year 658, attests that no one dared break a branch or offshoot of one. The legend itself allows us to see imperfectly some stumbling-blocks which the holy architect found in his way; they must have torn his feet as cruelly as those which we have seen him punish by hardening them, in the days when he was a public singer. At first there was a rude chief who passed near him with a great train of men, dogs, and horses, without saluting him, even without looking at him; again there was another who did not believe in his miracles, and said so out loud at supper before a large company, and in the face of the saint. At that same banquet, at the commencement of the repast, while Hervé was singing with the harp to bless the table, a new kind of adversary, the frogs, commenced also to sing, to defy him, to sing their vespers, as a Breton poet explains it, provoking the laughter of the guests. At another banquet, a cup-bearer who was a demon in disguise, one of those who excited to intemperance, to gluttony, to idleness and noise, to discord and quarrels, wishing to kill him, served him, together with the other guests, a beverage the effect of which was to make them cut each other's throats.
This evil spirit followed the holy architect even to the midst of a monastery, with the intention of deceiving him more surely. Taking the form of a monk, he offered his services to help him in building his church.
"What is thy name?" Hervé asked of him.
"I am a master carpenter, sir."
"Thy name, I tell thee," returned the saint.
"Sir, I am a mason, locksmith, able to work at any trade."
"Thy name? For the third time, I command thee in the name of the living God, to tell thy name."
"Hu-Kan! Hu-Kan! Hu-Kan!" cried the demon; and he threw himself, head foremost, from a rock into the sea.
Thus did the Druid superstitions vanish before Hervé, having for a moment resisted him, and sought to deceive him under different disguises.
This Hu-Kan, that is to say, Hu the genius, is no other than the god Hu-Kadarn of the Cambrian traditions. The devil who incites to idleness and debauchery is the Celtic divinity corresponding to the Liber or Bacchus of the Romans. There is in these frogs who chanted their vespers a recollection of Armorican paganism. "The saint silenced them as suddenly as if he had cut their throat" says a hagiographer, adding, "he left voice but to one, who ever since has continued to croak."
Now, by a sort of prodigy of tradition, a popular song, entitled the "Vespers of the Frogs," has come to us; it is the work of the pagan poets of Armorica, represented in common recitatives under the grotesque figure of these beastly croakers. It offers a summary of the Druid doctrines of the fourth century; and it seemed so necessary to the first Christian missionaries to destroy it, that they made a Latin and Christian counterpart, as if they would raise the cross in the face of the heathen pillars. One of these missionaries, Saint Gildas, was so opposed to the pagan music of his time that he qualified its croaking with the sweet and gentle music of the children of Christ; and his disciple Taliésin, the great poet baptized in the sixth century, hushed at a banquet, as Saint Hervé had done, the infamous descendants of the priests of the god Bel, who wished to put him to defiance.
The sound of Christian music was to be heard from all the vaults of the church, for the construction of which Saint Hervé had made so many journeys. Twelve columns of polished wood were erected to hold the low and arched framework; three large stones formed the altar; the spring with which he had refreshed his disciples furnished the water necessary to the sacrifice; the wheat sown by them, the bread for consecration; and the wines of some richer monastery, more exposed to the sun, the eucharistic wine; for it was an ancient and touching custom that those who had vineyards gave wine to those who had not, and in exchange, the owners of bees furnished wax to those who lacked it. Hervé, according to his biographers, himself superintended the workmen, or rather incited the laborers by his words, and sustained them by his songs. Like another poet of antiquity, he built, with his songs, not a city for men, but a house for God.
VI.
The fathers of an Armorican council of the fifth century terminated their canons by these noble words: "May God, my brethren, preserve for you your crown." A last flower seemed wanting to that of Hervé. He was now to obtain it. The poor shoeless child, the poet of the wretched, the school-teacher of little children, the wandering agriculturist, the mendicant architect, was to become the equal--what do I say?--the corrector of bishops and kings.
At that time there reigned a Kon Mor in Brittany, who had rendered himself abominable to the men of that country by his tyranny and cruelties. Unable to endure him, they flocked in great numbers from all parts of Armorica to their bishop, the blessed Samson; and as he saw them at his door, silent and with lowered heads, he asked them:
"What has happened to the country?"
Then answered the more respectable among them:
"The men of this land are in great desolation, sir."
"And why so?" asked Samson.
"We had a good chief of our own race, and born on our own land, who governed us by legitimate authority; and now there has come over us a foreign Kon Mor, a violent man, an enemy to justice, possessed of great power; he holds us under the most odious oppression; he has killed our national chief, and dishonored his widow, our queen. He would hare killed their Sun, had not the poor child taken to flight and sought refuge in France."
The bishop, moved with pity, promised the deputies that he would aid them, and seeking a means to re-establish their rightful chief, he resolved to begin by striking the usurper with the terrible arm of excommunication.
He therefore sent letters to all the Armorican bishops to unite with him in devising some means of frightening the tyrant. The place of reunion was a high mountain much venerated by the bards and the people, named the Run-bre, and situated in the heart of the country governed by the Kon Mor. Although only prelates should have been present, Hervé was sent there, and even the venerable assembly were not willing to enter into deliberation until he came, notwithstanding the opposition of one member of the meeting, less humble and less patient than the others. This courtier bishop, as the legend styles him, finding that Hervé made them wait a long time, "Is it proper that men like us," he exclaimed, "should remain here indefinitely on account of a wretched blind monk?" At this moment, the saint arrived. His bare feet, his miserable hermit's robe made of goat-skin, in the midst of the men and horses richly apparelled, belonging to the prelate of the court, drew perhaps a smile of proud disdain to the lips of many. Hearing the impious words of which he was the object, the saint was not irritated, but said gently to the bishop: "My brother, why reproach me with my blindness? Could not God have made you blind as well as me? Do you not know well that he makes us as he pleases, and that we should thank him that he has given us such a being as he has?" The other bishops, continues the legend, strongly rebuked this one, and he was not long in feeling the heavy hand of God; for he immediately fell to the ground, his face covered with blood, and lost his sight; but the good saint, wishing to render good for evil to this proud mocker, prayed to God for the unfortunate; and then, rubbing his eyes with salt and water, restored him his sight; he gave him understanding also; according to the remark of another hagiographer, understanding, that light of the soul, obscured by pride, more precious still and not less difficult to recover than the light of the body. After this they proceeded to the ceremony of excommunicating the great chief of the Armoricans.
Standing on a rock, at the summit of the mountain, a lighted taper in his hand, and surrounded by the nine bishops of Armorica, each one holding a blessed taper, the saint pronounced, in the name of all, according to the formula of the times, these terrible words against the foreign tyrant: "We in virtue of the authority which we hold from the Lord, in the name of God the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, do declare the great chief of the Armoricans excommunicated from the threshold of the holy church of God, and separated from the society of Christians; that, if he comes not quickly to repentance, we crush him beneath the weight of an eternal malediction, and condemn him by an irrevocable anathema. May he be exposed to the anger of the sovereign Judge, may he be torn from the heritage of God and his elect, that in this world he may be cut off from the communion of Christians, and that in the other he may have no part in the kingdom of God and his saints; but that, bound to the devil and his imps, he may live devoted to the flames of vengeance, and that he may be the prey, even in this world, to the tortures of hell. Cursed be he in his own house, cursed in his fields, cursed in his stomach, cursed be all things that he possesses, from his dog that howls at his appearance even to his cock who insults him by his crowing. May he share the lot of Dathan and Abiron whom hell swallowed alive; the lot of Ananias and of Sapphira, [{825}] who lied to the Apostles of the Lord, and were struck with instant death; the lot of Pilate and Judas, who were traitors to God; may he have no other sepulchre than have the asses, and may these tapers which we extinguish be the image of the darkness to which his soul is condemned. Amen." [Footnote 194]
[Footnote 194: This formula of excommunication of the sixth century has been discovered and recently translated by M. Alfred Ramé, in an article, the "Melanges d'Histoire et d'Archaeologie Bretonne," a commendable publication.]
The bishops repeated three times, Amen; and the president of the synod, having extinguished under his foot the candle which he held in his hand, all the prelates did the same. But this dying candle, the image of the extinguished light of the great chief, was not so easily relighted as that of the haughty prelate. Once the tyrant's head was under the bare foot of the mendicant monk, tyranny was dishonored and humanity avenged.
Hervé does not appear to have long survived this great act of national and religious justice, in which he performed the greatest part; he saw, however, the result, and could hail the dawn of a noble reign which would assure, without the effusion of blood, say the historians, the death of the usurper.
Another dawn was rising for the saint.
It is related that being shut up in the church which he had built, fasting and praying for three days, separated from his disciples and his pupils, the heavens opened above his head, and with the heavens his eyes were opened to contemplate the celestial court. Ravished to ecstasy, he chanted a Breton canticle, which was later put into writing, and has received its modern form from the last apostle of the Armoricans, Michel Le Nobletz.
"I see heaven opened, heaven my country; I would that I might fly there as a little white dove!
"The gates of Paradise are opened to receive me; the saints advance to meet me.
"I see, truly I see God the Father, and his blessed Son, and the Holy Ghost.
"How beautiful she is, the Holy Virgin, with the twelve stars which form her crown.
"Each with his harp in his hand, I see the angels and the archangels, singing the praises of God.
"And the virgins of all ages, and the saints of all conditions, and the holy women, and the widows crowned by God!
"I see radiant in glory and beauty, my father and my mother; I see my brothers and my countrymen.
"Choirs of little angels flying on their light wings, so rosy and so fair, fly around their heads, as a harmonious swarm of bees, honey-laden in a field of flowers.
"O happiness without parallel! the more I contemplate you, the more I long for you!"
The heavens did not close again until the canticle was finished, as if they had taken pleasure in the song of the predestined son of Hyvarnion and Rivanone, who heard him with smiles and called him to them.
VII.
Before the Revolution there was preserved in the treasury of the Cathedral of Nantes a silver shrine, enriched with precious stones, a present from an ancient Breton chief. In great judicial cases it was carried in procession to the judges to receive the solemn vows which they afterward made upon the book of the Evangelists. A king of France and a duke of Brittany, after long wars, united under this shrine their reconciled hands and swore to live in peace.
At the same time there was seen, in the depths of lower Brittany, in the sacristy of a little country church, an oaken cradle, with nothing about it remarkable unless its age. The inhabitants of the parish, however, venerated it as much as the silver shrine. The mendicant singers, above all, have [{826}] for it an especial affection. They love to touch it with their great musical instruments, their traveller's goods, their rosaries, their staffs, all that they have which is most precious. Kneeling before this cradle, they kiss it with respect, and arriving sad, they depart joyous.
Now, the silver shrine contained, wrapped in purple and silk, the relics of Saint Hervé. The oaken cradle was the same in which he slept to the songs of the bard and his poet-wife, whom God had given him for father and mother.
To-day the ducal reliquary is no longer in existence. The metal, thrice consecrated by sanctity, justice, and royalty, was stolen and melted down in that sadly memorable epoch when these three things, trampled under foot, were valued less than a bit of silver. But the wooden cradle of the humble patron of the singers of Brittany, that poor worm-eaten cradle, so like his fate on earth, exists still, and more than one mendicant having respectfully pressed his lips upon it, as in other times, goes away singing with a clearer voice and a comforted heart.
From Once a Week.
LOST FOR GOLD.
She stood by the hedge where the orchard slopes
Down to the river below;
The trees all white with their autumn hopes
Looked heaps of drifted snow;
They gleamed like ghosts through the twilight pale.
The shadowy river ran black;
"It's weary waiting," she said, with a wail,
"For them that never come back.
"The mountain waits there, barren and brown,
Till the yellow furze comes in spring
To crown his brows with a golden crown,
And girdle him like a king.
The river waits till the summer lays
The white lily on his track;
But it's weary waiting nights and days
For him that never comes back.
"Ah! the white lead kills in the heat of the fight.
When passions are hot and wild;
But the red gold kills by the fair fire-light
The love of father and child.
"'Tie twenty years since I heard him say,
When the wild March morn was airy,
Through the drizzly dawn--'I m going away,
To make you a fortune, Mary.'
[{827}]
"Twenty springs, with their long grey days.
When the tide runs up the sand,
And the west wind catches the birds, and lays
Them shrieking far inland.
"From the sea-wash'd reefs, and the stormy mull,
And the damp weed-tangled caves:--
Will he ever come back, O wild sea-gull.
Across the green salt waves?
"Twenty summers with blue flax bells,
And the young green corn on the lea,
That yellows by night in the moon, and swells
By day like a rippling sea.
"Twenty autumns with reddening leaves,
In their glorious harvest light
Steeping a thousand golden sheaves,
And doubling them all at night.
"Twenty winters, how long and drear!
With a patter of rain in the street.
And a sound in the last leaves, red and sere;
But never the sound of his feet.
The ploughmen talk by furrow and ridge,
I hear them day by day;
The horsemen ride down by the narrow bridge,
But never one comes this way.
And the voice that I long for is wanting ther,
And the face I would die to see,
Since he went away in the wild March air,
Ah! to make a fortune for me.
"O father dear I but you never thought
Of the fortune you squandered and lost;
Of the duty that never was sold and bought.
And the love beyond all cost.
"For the vile red dust you gave in thrall
The heart that was God's above;
How could you think that money was all,
When the world was won for love?
"You sought me wealth in the stranger's land,
Whose veins are veins of gold;
And the fortune God gave was in mine hand,
When yours was in its hold.
"If I might but look on your face," she says,
"And then let me have or lack;
But it's weary waiting nights and days
For him that never comes back."
From The Dublin University Magazine.
THE SOLUTION OF THE NILE PROBLEM. [Footnote 195]
[Footnote 195: "The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, and Exploration of the Nile Sources." By Samuel White Baker, M.A., F.R.G.S. London: Macmillan. & Co. 1865.]
For some time the complaint of those who have been everywhere, and seen everything men of travel and of fashion ought to see, has been that the world is "used-up" for the tourist. Where can he now go for a fresh sensation? Asia and America remain no more untrodden fields than Europe; and as for the isles of the farthest sea, rich and idle "fugitives and vagabonds" have braved as many dangers among savage tribes as the early missionaries, from impulse no nobler than restlessness. Whither next shall they direct their strides? Iceland stood in favor for a year or two; but the cooks are bad there, and the inhabitants speak Latin. Japan has novelties, but bland Daimios are not trustworthy. The sightseeker has no relish for being among a people who, on very slight provocation, may perform upon him a process akin to their own "happy despatch." In the exhaustion of interest in mere horizontal locomotion, the Cain-like race we form part of try the effect of ascension to the highest and hugest cloud-capped peaks; but Matterhorn accidents have rather brought these mountains-of-the-(full)-moon performances into disfavour. Pending the discovery of some new wonder or feat, to occupy many vacant minds and stir a few energetic ones, and during the crisis of a Continental war, the migratory section amongst us must bear their misery as best they can. It may console them to hope that the flying-machine will yet be perfected, and air-sailing supersede Alpine climbing. Probably it would be quite as exciting, and it would not tire the limbs. If there be one geographical problem still left unsolved, it must be to find the site of that cave of Adullam which has sorely puzzled numbers of erudite Parliamentarians, one of whom was heard to make answer to a query regarding its locality that he "never was a geographer." For the purpose of stimulating the curiosity of the gentleman, and of guiding him in his search among the lore of school-boy days, we may take from a book well known a real, and not figurative, description of the Cave in which shelter was lately found by some forty wayfarers uncertain as to their route in a difficult country. "Leaving our horses," says an Adullamite, who long preceded them, "in charge of wild------, and taking one for a guide, we started for the cave, having a fearful gorge below, gigantic cliffs above, and the path winding along a shelf of the rock, narrow enough to make the nervous among us shudder. At length, from a great rock hanging on the edge of this shelf, we sprang by a long leap into a low window which opened into the perpendicular face of the cliff. We were then within the hold of, ------ and creeping half-doubled through a narrow crevice for a few rods, we stood beneath the dark vault of the first grand chamber of this mysterious and oppressive cavern. Our whole collection of lights did little more than make the damp darkness visible. After groping about as long as we had time to spare, we returned to the light of day, fully convinced that with ------ and his lion-hearted followers inside, all the strength of ------ under ------ could not have forced an entrance." Next to a search for the celebrated cave, we can [{829}] imagine no geographical extravagance equal to one for those Nile Sources that have been the dream of ancients and moderns. The undertaking possessed an the attraction of freshness. Your North-west passage is a mere track through a waste, without the possibility of novelty. What its dangers and privations, its few monotonous sights and events, were to half-a-dozen navigators they would be to half-a-dozen more. But in passing upward to the huge plateau in Central Africa where the Nile Basin lies, itself again overtopped by the lofty range of the Blue Mountains, down which giant cascades ceaselessly roll in unwitnessed splendor, the traveller encounters perils enough, but relieved with a human interest. The tribes he meets are many and unique in their habits, strangely unlike each other, within short distances, and having about them an extraordinary mixture of an incipient civilization with some of the most depraved of the customs of savage life. In the journey, too, there is endless variety. The expedition up the river, with its hunting episodes, its difficulties with mutinous servants and seamen, its devices to appease native cupidity and circumvent native cunning, and its encounters with those vilest of the pursuers of commerce, the slave-traders, forms one part of the interest; and next come inland rides through tangled forest shades, rude villages of cone-shaped huts, suspicious hordes of naked barbarians, to whom every new face is that of a plunderer of slaves or cattle, and "situations" in which it is impossible for the honest traveller to escape sharp contests with a party of Turkish marauders, for whose sins against the commandment he would otherwise be held responsible by the relentless javelin-men of the desert. All this offers adventure of a genuine description to him who has the love of it in his disposition; and such a man is Mr. Samuel White Baker. His impulses are irrepressible: nature made him a traveller. He is the modern counterpart of those primitive personages, the Columbuses of the times just succeeding the flood, whose purposeless wanderings into far space from the spot where the Mesopotamian cradle of mankind was rocked, peopled lands lying even beyond great seas; men whose feats were such that the philosophers of five thousand years after can hardly believe they performed them. If Mr. Baker had been a dweller in Charran, he would have begged the patriarch Abraham to give him camels, water-bags, and bushels of corn, and would have set off for the eastern margin of the globe, and the shores of the loud-sounding sea. Arrived there, he would have burned a tree hollow, and launched boldly forth upon the deep, to go whithersoever fortune listed.
All his life a traveller in the true sense, Mr. Baker last conceived the idea of securing for "England" the glory of discovering the sources of the Nile. This bit of patriotic sentiment undoubtedly added to the zest of the undertaking, to which, as has been said, he was impelled by instinct. He is a man of resolute will, and to think and to do are with him simultaneous acts. His preparations were instantly in progress, and from that moment his motto, come what might, was--Forward. Part of this perseverance no doubt was due to the encouragement of Mrs. Baker's presence. That lady is the model explorer's wife, and we could wish for such a race of women if there were any problems geographical left to be solved. She set out with Mr. Baker from Cairo, determined to go through all dangers with him, and well knowing their nature; and she successfully accomplished the task, and has returned to share his renown. To a full share of it she is really entitled; for Mrs. Baker was much more than a companion to her husband on his wanderings. She assisted him materially, not only tending him when sick, not only conciliating the natives by her kindness, but contributing to remove difficulties by wise [{830}] counsel, bearing all hardships uncomplainingly, and--rare virtue!--submitting to her lord's authority when he was warranted in deciding what was best to be done, or left undone. Mrs. Baker could also somewhat play the Amazon when occasion required. If she did not actually take the shield and falchion, and go to the front of the fight, she spread out the arms, loaded and prepared the weapons, and rendered brave and effective aid on an occasion when the Discoverer of the Great Basin of the Nile was likely to have become, if he did not succeed in intimidating his foes by the parade of his armory, a sweet morsel for the palate of the Latookas. Mr. Baker speaks with manly tenderness of his wife, and the picture drawn of her in his incidental references, will gain for her hosts of friends among his readers.
The narrative is quiet until he reaches Gondokoro. There, in March, 1863, he met Speke and Grant, who were descending the Nile, having completed the East African expedition. When there the report reached him on a certain morning that there were two white men approaching who had come from the sea. These were the travellers from the Victoria N'Yanza, the other, and smaller, source of the Nile. They had undoubtedly solved the mystery. Still they had left something for Baker to do, and candidly declared to him that they had not completed the actual exploration of the Nile sources. In N. lat. 2° 17' they had crossed the river which they had tracked from the Victoria Lake; but it had there (at Karuma Falls) taken an extraordinary bend westward, and when they met it again it was flowing from the W.S.W. There was clearly another source, and Kamrasi, King of Unyoro, had informed them that from the Victoria N'Yanza the Nile flowed westward for several days' journey, and fell into another lake called the Luta N'Zige, from which it almost immediately emerged again, and continued its course as a navigable river to the north. Speke and Grant would have tracked out this second source had not the tribes in the districts been at the time at fend, and on such occasions they will not abide the face of a stranger. Mr. Baker, guided by their hints, set out to complete what they had begun.
Gondokoro is a great slave-market--Mr. Baker says "a perfect hell," "a colony of cut-throats." The Egyptian authorities wink at what goes on, in consideration of liberal largesses. There were about six hundred traders there when Mr. Baker visited it, drinking, quarrelling, and beating their slaves. These ruffians made razzias on the cattle of the natives, who are a cleanly and rather industrious race of the picturesque type of savage. Their bodies are tattooed all over, and an immense cock's feather, rising out of the single tuft of hair left upon their shaven crowns, gives them rather an imposing appearance. Their weapons of defence are poisoned arrows, with which the traders at times make deadly acquaintance. Of course Mr. Baker had unforeseen difficulties on setting out. What traveller ever started on an expedition without meeting with his most irritating obstacles at the threshold? Mr. Baker, however, was an old hand, and it took a good deal to daunt him. His escort were as troublesome a set of vagabonds as could have been collected together probably in Africa itself. He had a mutiny to quell ere many days; and it is at this point we come to see what sort of man is our explorer. He is a muscular Christian of the stoutest type. Heavy fell his hand on skulls of sinning niggers--it was the readiest implement, and down went the offender under the blow so signally that his fellows saw and trembled. Mr. Baker was a great "packer." His asses and camels carried a vast amount of stuff, but so arranged and fitted that no breakdown occurred in the most trying situations for man and beast.
The Latookas were the first race of savages Mr. Baker encountered. They are about six feet high, and muscular and well-proportioned. They have a pleasing cast of countenance, and are in manner very civil. They are extremely clever blacksmiths, and shape their lances and bucklers most skilfully. One of the most interesting passages of the whole book is the author's account of this tribe:
"Far from being the morose set of savages that I had hitherto seen, they are excessively merry, and always ready for either a laugh or a fight. The town of Tarrangotté contained about three thousand houses, and was not only surrounded by iron-wood palisades, but every house was individually fortified by a little stockaded courtyard. The cattle were kept in large kraals in various parts of the town, and were most carefully attended to, fires being lit every night to protect them from flies, and high platforms in three tiers were erected in many places, upon which sentinels watched both day and night, to give the alarm in case of danger. The cattle are the wealth of the country, and so rich are the Latookas in oxen, that ten or twelve thousand head are housed in every large town. . . . The houses of the Latookas are bell-shaped. The doorway is only two feet and two inches high, and thus an entrance must be effected on all-fours. The interior is remarkably clean, but dark, as the architects have no idea of windows."
Mr. Baker notices the fact that the circular form of hut is the only style of architecture adopted among all the tribes of Central Africa, and also among the Arabs of Upper Egypt; and that although there are variations in the form of the roof, no tribe has ever yet dreamt of constructing a window. The Latookas are obliged constantly to watch for their enemy, a neighboring race of mule-riders, whose cavalry attacks they can hardly withstand, although of war-like habits, and accordingly--
"The town of Tarrangotté is arranged with several entrances in the shape of low archways through the palisades: these are closed at night by large branches of the hooked thorn of the bitter bush, (a species of mimosa.) The main street is broad, but all others are studiously arranged to admit only of one cow, single file, between high stockades. Thus, in the event of an attack, these narrow passages can be easily defended, and it would be impossible to drive off their vast herds of cattle unless by the main street. The large cattle kraals are accordingly arranged in various quarters in connection with the great road, and the entrance of each kraal is a small archway in the strong iron-wood fence, sufficiently wide to admit one ox at a time. Suspended from the arch is a bell, formed of the shell of the Dolape palm-nut, against which every animal must strike either its horns or back on entrance. Every tinkle of the bell announces the passage of an ox into the kraal, and they are thus counted every evening when brought home from pasture."
The toilet of the natives is of the simplest, except in one particular. The Latooka savage is content that his whole body should be naked, but expends the most elaborate care on his headdress. Every tribe in this district has a distinct fashion of arranging it, but the Latookas reduce it to a science. Mr. Baker describes the process and the result:
"European ladies would be startled at the fact, that to perfect the coiffure of a man requires a period of from eight to ten years! However tedious the operation the result is extraordinary. The Latookas wear most exquisite helmets, all of which are formed of their own hair, and are, of course, fixtures. At first sight it appears incredible; but a minute examination shows the wonderful perseverance of years in producing what must be highly inconvenient. The thick crisp wool is woven with fine twine, formed from the bark of a tree, until it presents a thick network of felt. As the hair grows through this matted substance it is subjected to the same process, until, in the course of years, a compact substance is formed, like a strong felt, about an inch and a half thick, that has been trained into the shape of a helmet. A strong rim of about two inches deep is formed by drawing it together with thread, and the front part of the helmet is protected by a piece of polished copper, while a piece of the same metal, shaped like the half of a bishop's mitre, and about a foot in length, forms the crest. The framework of the helmet being at length completed, it must be perfected by an arrangement of beads, should the owner of the head be sufficiently rich to indulge in the coveted distinction. The beads most in fashion are the red and the blue porcelain, about the size of small peas. These are sewn on the surface of the felt, and so beautifully arranged in sections of blue and red, that the entire helmet appears to be formed of beads, and the handsome crest of polished copper, surmounted by ostrich plumes, gives a most dignified and martial appearance to this elaborate head-dress."
With Commoro, chief of the Latookas, Mr. Baker had a religious conversation. The savage was clever, even subtile. He does not appear, however to have shaken the faith of the traveller. Probably had Mr. Baker been a Bishop (Colenso) trained in the theology of the schools, he might have been driven crazy by this mid-African counterpart of the famous Zulu. The natives exhume the bones of their dead, and celebrate a sort of dance round them; and Mr. Baker asked his Latookan friend--
"Have you no belief in a future existence after death? Is not some idea expressed in the act of exhuming the bones after the flesh is decayed?"
Commoro (loq.)--"Existence after death! How can that be? Can a dead man get out of his grave unless we dig him out?"
"Do you think a man is like a beast that dies and is ended?"
Commoro.--"Certainly. An ox is stronger than a man, but he dies, and his bones last longer; they are bigger. A man's bones break quickly; he is weak."
"Is not a man superior in sense to an ox? Has he not a mind to direct his actions?"
Commoro.--"Some men are not so clever as an ox. Men must sow corn to obtain food, but the ox and wild animals can procure it without sowing."
"Do you not know that there is a spirit within you more than flesh? Do you not dream and wander in thought to distant places in your sleep? Nevertheless, your body rests in one spot. How do you account for this?"
Commoro (laughing.)--"Well, how do you account for it?"
. . .
"If you have no belief in a future state, why should a man be good? Why should he not be bad, if he can prosper by wickedness?"
Commoro. --"Most people are bad; if they are strong, they take from the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad."
Extremes meet; there are sages of modern days whose much learning has brought them up to the intellectual pitch of the savage's materialism. They might, ingenious as they are, even take a lesson in sophistry from the Latookan. When driven into a corner by the use of St. Paul's metaphor, the astute Commoro answered:
"Exactly so; that I understand. But the original grain does not rise again; it rots, like the dead man, and is ended. The fruit produced is not the same grain that was buried, but the production of that grain. So it is with man. I die, and decay, and am ended; but my children grow up, like the fruit of the grain. Some men have no children, and some grains perish without fruit; then all are ended."
Nevertheless, the Latookans continue to dig out the bones of their kindred, and to perform a rite around them which is manifestly a tradition from the time when a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among them.
It was impossible for Mr. Baker to reach the Lake toward which he pressed without appeasing Kamrasi, King of the Unyoros. But to do this was not easy when his stock of presents was getting low, and his men were so few and weak as to inspire no barbarian prince with the slightest fear. Yet, though debilitated with fever, his quinine exhausted, and Mrs. Baker stricken down in the disease, he pressed on with an unquenchable zeal--one would almost write worthy of a better cause. Finally, he was abundantly rewarded. Hurrying on in advance of his escort he reached at last, ere the sun had risen on what proved afterward a brilliant day, the summit of the hills that hem the great valley occupied by the vast Nile Source. There it lay "a sea of quicksilver" far beneath, stretching boundlessly off to the vast Blue Mountains which, on the opposite side towered upward from its bosom, and over whose breasts cascades could be discerned by the telescope tumbling down in numerous torrents. Standing 1500 feet above the level of the Lake, Mr. Baker shouted for joy that "England had won the Sources of the Nile!" and called the gigantic reservoir the Albert N'Yanza. The Victoria and Albert Lakes, then, are the [{833}] Nile Sources. Clambering down the steep--his wife, just recovered from fever, and intensely weak, leaning upon him--Mr. Baker reached the shore at length of the great expanse of water, and rushing into it, drank eagerly, with an enthusiasm almost reaching the ancient Egyptian point of Nile-worship.
Mr. Baker describes the Albert Lake as the grand reservoir, and the Victoria as the Eastern source.
"The Nile, cleared of its mystery, resolves itself into comparative simplicity. The actual basin of the Nile is included between about the 22° and 39° east longitude, and from 3° south to 18° north latitude. The drainage of that vast area is monopolized by the Egyptian river. . . The Albert N'Yanza is the great basin of the Nile: the distinction between it and the Victoria N'Yanza is, that the Victoria is a reservoir receiving the eastern affluents, and it becomes the starting-point or the most elevated source at the point where the river issues from it at the Ripon Falls; the Albert is a reservoir not only receiving the western and southern affluents direct from the Blue Mountains, but it also receives the supply from the Victoria and from the entire equatorial Nile basin. The Nile, as it issues from the Albert N'Yanza is the entire Nile; prior to its birth from the Albert Lake it is not the entire Nile."
". . . Ptolemy had described the Nile sources as emanating from two great lakes that received the snows of the mountains in Ethiopia. There are many ancient maps existing upon which these lakes are marked as positive. There can be little doubt that trade had been carried on between the Arabs from the Red Sea and the coast opposite Zanzitan in ancient times, and that the people engaged in such enterprises had penetrated so far as to have gained a knowledge of the existence of the two reservoirs."
The interest of Mr. Baker's volumes of course culminates with his account of the Great Lake. He embarked in a canoe of the country, and with his party in another, navigated it for a long distance, encountering storms and weathering them with a skill and courage which show him as cool and experienced a traveller on sea as on land. On his return overland he was again in perils oft. But the same undying spirit which supported him through a dozen fevers carried him through every danger triumphantly. The English nation has reason to be proud of such men, and of such women as Mrs. Baker still more. Devotion like hers honors the sex. There is an end, however, of Nile voyaging with the old object. If the Victoria and Albert Lakes are revisited it will be in pursuit of other ends than mere geographical inquiry or curiosity. Mr. Baker seems to think that missionaries may be the first to follow in the track he has made, and it is a fact that next to professional explorers (if even second to them) those influenced by religious zeal have made the most daring expeditions into unknown regions. Livingstone has done even more in another part of Africa than Baker did on the great level, which, as he thinks, from its altitude, escaped being submerged at any previous part of the world's history, and may contain at this moment the descendants of a pre-Adamite race. On the ethnology of the central Africans he can throw no light, and his mere speculations are worthless, but he is doubtless right in considering that commerce must precede religious propagandism among those races, if anything is really to be done for their benefit. For commerce there are large opportunities, if only the abominable slave-trade, which makes fiends of the natives, were effectually suppressed. Mr. Baker writes warmly on this point, and none knows better the character and extent of the evil. A more interesting book of travel was never written than his Albert N'Yanza: in every page there is fresh and vivid interest. The author, who is admirable in many things, is a model narrator, and there is no romance at all equal in attraction to the simple and unvarnished, but full and picturesque, account of his protracted and exciting travels.
Translated from the French.
THREE WOMEN OF OUR TIME.
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN--CHARLOTTE BRONTË--RAHEL LEVIN.
BY GABRIEL CERNY.
It is now quite a number of years since it became the fashion to study women, and writers of note have called to life more than one who would have preferred being left to oblivion under her cold tombstone. Is it not enough to have lived once even if we have lived wisely? "No one would accept an existence that was to last forever," said a philosopher who had suffered from the injustice of mankind.
It seems, for example, as if the heroines of the seventeenth century must smile in pity to see the pettiest actions of their lives as well as the deepest inspirations of their hearts given up for food to the indiscreet curiosity and vivid imagination of the eminent philosopher who had so lovingly resuscitated them. And the intellectual women who came after them, are not they not often wounded by the judgments passed upon them by the most inquisitive and fertile of critics?
In two works entirely devoted to woman, a fantaisiste who was once an historian, has tried to explain the best means to insure happiness to the fairer half of the human race, with a minuteness very tender in intention but often quite repugnant to our taste. He states in detail the hygienic care indispensable to creatures weak in body, feeble in mind, and so helpless when left to themselves that in truth there are but two conditions in the world suitable for them--to be courtesans if they are beautiful, and maid-servants if they are destitute of physical charms; nay, such is the arrogance of this literary Céladon that he would assign to the wife an inferior position and leave the husband to superintend not only business affairs but household matters. In short, when we read these books we seem to be attending a session of the Naturalization Society, teaching the public to rear and domesticate some valuable animal much to be distrusted.
Not even the toilettes of the eighteenth century have failed to arouse the interest of two authors of our day, who, displeased perhaps with the slight success of their book, have now abandoned the range of realities for the dreary delusions of a lawless realism. In a work as long as it is tiresome, they have described with feminine lucidity the various costumes of the ladies of the court of Louis XV., of the Revolution, and the Empire.
A book has now appeared which, according to its title, promises to show us the "Intellect of Women of our own Time," but in reality confines itself to giving three interesting biographies. The author was already known to the public through a romance which reveals true talent "Daniel Blady," the story of a musician, is written in the German style, and shows an elevation of sentiment, a straightforward honesty of principle, and above all a simplicity of devotion rarely to be met with in the world. M. Camille Selden admires modest women, incapable of personal ambition or vanity, who consecrate all the tender and enlivening faculties of soul and reason to the service of a husband, father, or brother, and such a woman he portrays in "Daniel Blady."
In order to represent fairly the women of our day M. Selden has selected three different characters; three names worn modestly, usefully, and honorably; three contrasts of position, race, doctrine, and education: a French Catholic, an English Protestant, a German Jewess: Eugénie de Guérin, Charlotte Brontë, and Rachel Varnhagen von Ense. They were all affectionate, devoted, and self-forgetful; two of them married, and the French-woman alone had the happy privilege of restoring to God a heart and soul that had belonged to no one.
I.
Eugénie de Guérin du Cayla was born and bred en province, although of a truly noble family, of Venetian origin it is said. Her mode of life was that of a woman of the middle class (bourgeoise) enjoying that comparative ease which we see in the country; a large house scantily furnished, a garden less cultivated than the fields, and servants of little or no training, who seem to form a part of the family.
Mlle. de Guérin lost her mother early, and having two brothers and a sister younger than herself, became burthened with the care of a household and family. Her letters and journal show her to us as she was at twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age, not one of those persons of morose and frigid virtue who are good for nothing but to mend linen and take care of birds, but a woman of intelligent and unembarrassed activity. She made fires, visited the poultry-yard, prepared breakfast for the reapers, and when her work was done, betook herself in all haste to a little retreat which she dignified with the name of study, where she ran through some book or wrote a few pages--always charming, always strong--of a sort of journal of the actions of her life. Eugénie's especial favorite was her brother Maurice, who was five years younger than herself, and it would be impossible to speak of her without recalling the passionate maternal tenderness with which from her earliest youth she regarded this brother whom she had loved to rock and nurse in infancy.
"I remember that you sometimes made me jealous," she wrote to him one day, "it was because I was a little older than you, and I did not know that tenderness and caresses, the hearts milk, are lavished on the little ones."
Devotion was the principle motive-power of Eugénie's actions; ardent prayer and charity profoundly moved her; wind, snow, rain-storms, nothing checked her when she knew that in some corner of the village there were miseries to be relieved, tears to be wiped away. She felt sympathy with all living creatures, even if they were inanimate like trees and flowers; she sighed when the wind bowed them down; "she pitied them, comparing them to unhappy human beings bending beneath misfortune," and imitating the example of the great saint, Francis of Assisi, she would gladly have conversed with lambs and turtle-doves.
Mlle. de Guérin pitied the educated peasants who knew how to read and yet could not pray. "Prayer to God," she said, "is the only fit manner to celebrate any thing in this world." And again, "Nothing is easier than to speak to the neglected ones of this world; they are not like us, full of tumultuous or perverse thoughts that prevent them from hearing."
She loved religion with its festivals and splendors; and breathed in God with the incense and flowers on the altar, nor could she ever have understood an invisible, abstract God, a God simply the guardian of morality as Protestants believe him to be.
Most women become useful only through some being whom they love and to whom they refer the actions of their lives; it is their noblest and most natural instinct to efface and lose themselves in another's glory. Having no husband or children, Mlle. de Guérin attached herself to her brother Maurice, a delicate nature, a sad [{836}] and suffering soul, destined to self-destruction, a lofty but unquiet spirit that was never to find on earth the satisfaction and realization of his hopes. "You are the one of all the family," he wrote to her, "whose disposition is most in sympathy with my own, so far as I can judge by the verses that you send me, in all of which there is a gentle reverie, a tinge of melancholy, in short, which forms, I believe, the basis of my character." Mlle. de Guérin's letters to her brother were not only tender and consoling, but strong and healthy in their tone. Indeed, he needed them, for terrible were his sufferings from the ill-will and indifference of others. He wrote and tried to establish himself as a critic; but some publishers rejected him and others evaded his proposals with vague promises, until with despair he saw every issue closed to him, and knew not what answer to make to his father, who grew impatient at the constant failure of his expectations.
Though ignorant of the world, Mlle, de Guérin did not the less suspect the dangers that Christian faith may encounter. One day, a voice that seemed to come from heaven told her that Maurice no longer prayed; and then we find her trembling and uneasy. "I have received your letter," she says, "and I see you in it, but I do not recognize you; for you only open your mind to me, and it is your heart, your soul, your inmost being that I long to see. Return to prayer, your soul is full of love and craves expansion; believe, hope, love, and all the rest shall be added. If I could only see you a Christian! Oh! I would give my life and everything else for that." . . . Like all persons who try to dispense with the divine restraints of the precepts of the gospel, poor Maurice struggled in a dreary world; his sensitive and poetic soul saw God everywhere except in his own heart; he longed sometimes to be a flower, or a bird, or verdure; his brain and imagination ran away with him, and his soul poured itself forth without restraint, and lost its way through wandering from the veritable Source of life.
This passion for nature led him to write a work which shows genuine power even if it be unproductive; a prose poem in which Christianity is forgotten for the sake of fable and antiquity. But thanks to his sister's prayers, Maurice was one of those who return to God. He passed away without agitation or suffering, smiling on all, and begging his sister Eugénie to read him some spiritual book. At the bottom of his heart he had never ceased to love God, and he returned to him as a little child returns to its mother.
Eugénie did not give herself up to vain despair after Maurice's death. Thinking perpetually of him whom she had loved so deeply, she busied herself with the writings which he had left behind him, and prayed for his soul, recommending him also to the prayers of her friends. She still addressed herself to him, and oppressed with sadness unto death, communed with his absent soul, imploring him to come to her. "Maurice, my friend, what is heaven, that home of friends? Will you never give me any sign of life? Shall I never hear you, as the dead are sometimes said to make themselves heard? Oh! if it be possible, if there exist any communication between this world and the other, return to me!"
But one day she grew weary of this unanswered correspondence, and a moral exhaustion took possession of her. "Let us cast our hearts into eternity," she cried. These were her last words, and she died, glad to see her life accomplished, confiding in the mercy of God, in his goodness who reunites the soul which he has severed here below, but never has forgotten in their bereavement.
II.
Charlotte Brontë, (Currer Bell,) whom M. Camille Selden offers to us as a type of energy and virtue, was the daughter of a country clergyman. Sad was the childhood and sad the youth of the poor English girl. Her mother was an invalid, her father a man of gloomy and almost fierce disposition, their means were so limited as to border upon poverty, and as if to complete the dreary picture, the scenery about the parsonage was "austere and lugubrious to contemplate, like the sea beneath an impending tempest."
In England the clerical profession is totally unlike the holy mission of a Catholic clergyman. The ecclesiastical life there is a career, not a vocation. "Mr. Brontë never left home unarmed," a singular method of preaching peace to the world and reconciliation among brethren. He was a good father, no doubt--almost all Englishmen are so. But he kept his family at a distance, and spoke to them seldom, and then in a curt and supercilious manner. His morose spirit did not relish the society of children, and if he became the preceptor of his little family, it was rather in order to fulfil a duty and conform himself to custom, than from a feeling of tenderness or even solicitude for their future welfare. Thus the minister's children lived amid influences which were cold and serious, but upright, and in a certain sense strengthening. There are so many children in every English family that parents of the middle class are obliged to treat them less as subordinates than as auxiliaries. The children are less familiar with their parents but more respectful than among us; life is not so easy and gentle, education more masculine.
Independence is the goal toward which all young English people tend, and both girls and boys are early taught that labor alone can lead them to it. In France we long impatiently for the time to shut up our children in the high-walled barracks which we dignify with the name of boarding-schools; for it is extremely necessary, we say, to be rid of idle, noisy boys. Girls are generally educated at home, but either through weakness or indifference, they are treated with far too much indulgence. "Poor little things!" we say pathetically; "who can tell what fate awaits them in married life?" for in this country we so far forget Christian duty as to make marriage a necessity, an obligation, a matter of business, instead of seeking therein, as the English do, a basis of true happiness.
Children, educated as they are in England, early acquire habits of observation and reflection; sitting around the tea-table in the evening, they listen to the conversation of their grandparents, and are often questioned upon the most serious subjects. This is Protestantism, you say. Not at all: it is the remains of the Christian spirit anterior to the Reformation. This spirit is exhibited in habits as in laws. If family life among us were truly catholic, we should possess all this and in greater perfection.
There is another practice in England which is often beneficial, and which we do not dare to adopt openly in France. I mean the habit of writing out one's impressions. This seems to be as natural in England as thought; and mothers, young girls, and men consider it a duty to keep an account of the good ideas that occur to them or of the interesting facts they may observe.
In France, on the contrary, true literary culture is closed to women, and there is a general outcry whenever any woman takes the liberty of publishing a work under her own name. It is thought quite natural that a young girl, with a dress outrageously decolletée and her head covered with flowers, should appear upon a stage and sing a bravura; but let her venture to write, and the world accuses her of want of reserve.
A Frenchman has such a horror of anything methodical and serious that he prefers to educate his daughters without thought or reflection, at hap-hazard and with no provision for [{838}] the future. Frenchwomen understand everything without study, it is said; this may be true, and the merit is not so great as to make it worth while to deny the assertion. What a superficial method! what an incredible way to acquire knowledge and judgment!
Englishwomen on the contrary, devote themselves to a regular course of instruction; they read a great deal, making extracts and critical notes, and thus avoid idleness and ennui, those two terrible diseases that affect womankind. Unfortunately abuses glide into their reading, and novels or even newspapers hold a place there which they ought not to occupy. This is a fruit of Protestantism, of free inquiry, and if our faith were firm and practical, we should know how to avoid the abuse and accept the useful side of this custom.
But there is again a situation which Englishwomen meet with a better grace than Frenchwomen--we mean the misfortune of remaining unmarried at twenty-eight or thirty years of age--of becoming old maids. With us, as soon as a daughter comes into the world we begin to think of amassing her dower; for it is the value of this dower which is to secure a good or bad marriage for her. We persuade her that it is almost a disgrace to remain unmarried, but by a tacit agreement we conceal from her the fact that marriage, as the Church instituted it, is the union of two souls equal in the sight of God, and that in giving her hand to a man, she becomes half of himself and flesh of his flesh. No, it is not a question of heart or of duty; she marries a man whom she has known scarcely two months, and her family triumphantly congratulate themselves on being freed from the unpleasant possibility of harboring an old maid. To avoid this, some marriages are a mere sale, a present shame, a future misery, and a final sin.
As in England daughters have no dower, and sons are valued much more highly, young women are early prepared not to marry, and are neither sadder nor more unfortunate on that account. Care of the little ones in the family; that pleasant occupation belonging by right to maiden aunts, (tantes berceuses,) study, attentive observation of men and things, and the consciousness of intellectual worth, sustain the Englishwomen until the moment, often distant, and never to arrive for many a one, when a good, sincere, and intelligent man shall unite her lot to his; but as she has self-respect and does not consider loss of youth as loss of caste, she does not accept the suitor unless she knows him well and is certain that he does not wish to take her or buy her pour faire une fin.
Charlotte, like Eugénie and like Rahel, of whom we shall speak in her turn, was rather insignificant in appearance; her features were irregular, her forehead prominent, and her eyes small but deep and piercing in expression. She was educated with two of her sisters in a boarding-school, where the regimen was hard and unhealthy, the uniform coarse, and the food insufficient and ill cooked. Mr. Brontë turned a deaf ear to his eldest daughter's complaints for a long time, and did not decide to take his children home until one of them had already sunk under the injudicious treatment. Charlotte was then placed with Miss W----, with whom she lived eight years as pupil and second teacher. And here M. Camille Selden gives us some excellent remarks upon the difference existing between the French lay pension with its supplementary course, and the English boarding-school.
"In the former, as in a well-disciplined army, every movement, every manoeuvre must be executed in union, even the recess is subject to rules. In the midst of her battalion of teachers and sub-mistresses, the French directress, en grande tenue, resembles a brilliant colonel marching proudly at the head of his squadron in a review."
"The object of education in England is at once simpler and gentler. It is thought there to be the duty of a woman, as of a man, to develop the judgment by study; that reflection and observation are equally necessary to teach both sexes how to live wisely and think justly. Therefore we never hear of courses of study where under the pretext of maternal education, gentlemen in black coats give out bribes for history, geography--nay, even philosophy, to little girls who come there apparently to study under maternal supervision, but in reality to learn to receive company and dress tastefully; in one word, to rehearse the worldly comedy which a little later they will be condemned to enact."
The author should have completed his picture by giving an exact account of our houses of religious education; but I think he knows little about them, and cares little to get information concerning them, which accounts for certain wants in his book.
Poor Charlotte Brontë was never young, partly because of her childish sufferings, but chiefly because of her serious and inquiring nature, which applied its powers to investigating and analyzing the sources of everything. She did not indulge in the childish ideas of a school girl, and being free from the dangerous enthusiasm that imagination engenders, she understood the full extent of human misery without exaggerating it, and if she was deprived of illusions at least she was spared disappointment. And yet she suffered; her vigorous soul, her fertile intellect imprisoned in this common-place situation, were stifled as in a cage; and to complete her misery came religious terrors, frightful visions of "failing grace and impossible salvation," until her awe-struck heart recoiled in affright.
Like all souls ardently loving goodness and thirsting from the true love, she sighed after the bliss of heaven: "I would be willing," she exclaimed, "I would be willing to exchange my eighteen years for gray hairs--or even to stand on the verge of the grave, if by that means I could be assured of the divine mercy;" but alas! in the practices of that dry and personal religion in which each one answers to himself for himself, and whence confidence is banished as a weakness, where should she look for help?
Meanwhile the circle of poverty was drawing closer and closer about Charlotte and her sisters, and a thousand thoughts sprang up in the brain of the courageous girl: "I wish to make money, no matter how--if only the means be honest! nothing would discourage me," said she; "but I should not care to be a cook--I should prefer being housemaid." In the evening, when every one else was in bed, she used to meet her sisters in the little parlor, and they would read to each other their literary efforts in a low voice. They decided with one accord that Charlotte must write to Southey and send him a book of her poems. The poet saw no great merit in these effusions and tried to discourage Charlotte, giving her at the same time excellent moral advice upon the nothingness of celebrity and the dangers of ambition.
She decided then to make a journey to Belgium in order to study French, but she was almost immediately recalled home. The old aunt who had kept house during her absence was dead, her father was becoming blind, and her brother was subject to attacks of delirium in which he threatened his father's life. It was amid these terrible calamities that Miss Brontë wrote "Jane Eyre," the most powerful of her novels.
The next plan was that she and her sisters should all write together and get a volume printed at their own expense under the names of Ellis, Acton, and Currer Bell. It may well be imagined that this unfortunate book, sent out like a foundling into the literary world, met with no success, for if the beginnings of any career are precarious, the obstacles presented by literature are insurmountable to any one [{840}] not possessed of immense energy. We know Charlotte well enough to feel sure that she was not a woman to waste away in the dejection of sterile discouragement; she began to write again, and composed "The Professor." Alas! the poor little book travelled about from publisher to publisher without finding rest anywhere; and such was the naïveté of its author, that in her eagerness to send her rejected book to each new bookseller, she forgot to remove the old postage stamps from the package--not an encouraging recommendation to any editor to accept the leavings of his confrères!
It was at Manchester, during six weeks that she passed there with her father, who was forced to undergo an operation for cataract, that Miss Brontë finished "Jane Eyre." Messrs. Smith and Elder of London accepted the manuscript without hesitation, and from that time the obscure young girl was a celebrity whom every one longed to know and to receive.
Charlotte's literary success brought a ray of joy into Mr. Brontë's melancholy household, but it was of short duration. Twice within two months the inhabitants of Haworth saw the window-blinds of the parsonage closed, and heard the bell toll a death-knell. Charlotte's brother, prostrated by excesses, and consumed internally, died in the course of fifteen minutes; but they were minutes of awful anguish; in the grasp of the death-agony the dying man started to his feet, crying out that he would die standing, and that his will should give way only with his breath. Her elder sister, Emily, left home for the last time when she followed his bier to the grave; and another sister, the youngest and Charlotte's well-beloved, Anna Brontë, sustained herself awhile by dint of care and tenderness, but her lungs were affected and she soon began to languish; she too declined and died.
Poor Charlotte now found herself alone with her father who had lost five of his six children. She devoted herself to writing, as much to distract her grief as to deceive the long hours of the day; and henceforth her personality presented two distinct faces. She was a conscientious Englishwoman, a clergyman's daughter attached to her duties, and an authoress, ardent and active in defence of her convictions, and not without a certain obstinacy. "Her success continued, and she was obliged to submit to the exhibition to which English enthusiasm and bad taste subject their favorites. Miss Brontë had to go to dinner-parties, and to reunions of unlooked-for luxury and splendor; but the distinction that flattered her most was being placed by Thackeray in the seat of honor to hear the first lecture of this celebrated author at Willis's Rooms."
But solitude which had been the foundation and habit of her life, rendered her unfit for the world. Miss Brontë had suffered too much to preserve that serenity of temper and freedom of spirit necessary to enable one to talk easily and agreeably, and often would she sit silent amid a cross-fire of conversation all around her "I was forced to explain," she said, "that I was silent because I could talk no more."
Charlotte Brontë had arrived at the age of thirty-eight years without having had her heart touched with any emotion stronger than dutiful affection for her family. But--and here prose intrudes itself a little--her father had a vicar, and what could an English vicar do but be married? He loved Charlotte, and moreover, she had become a good match; but on one hand the fear of a refusal, and on the other the dread of the embarrassment for a clergyman of sharing the existence of a literary woman, prevented him from declaring his affections. At last, however, he took courage, and I ask myself if this courage was not rendered more attainable by Charlotte herself. At all events she accepted his offer without hesitation; but her father, who was too selfish to allow his daughter to occupy herself with any one but himself, opposed the marriage, and the enamored vicar left Haworth.
The privation that Mr. Brontë experienced after his vicar's departure--a privation that Miss Brontë's temperament must have made him feel more sensibly--was such that he recalled the suitor, and the marriage took place. It was a dreary ceremony: no relations, no friends, so that the bride positively had no one to lead her to the altar; for her father had refused to be present at the marriage for fear of feeling agitated, faithful to the end to the dry and egotistical line of conduct he had marked out for himself.
The wife devoted herself bravely to seconding her husband in the duties of his ministry. She visited the poor, had a Sunday-school, improvised prayers and knew the Bible by heart. She was happy--but her happiness was of short duration, for physical and moral sufferings had exhausted her, and she died just as life had become harmonized according to her wishes.
A celebrated author, a strong and courageous woman, aspiring after a Christian life, she gave all that a heart can give which is not possessed of the true light; and M. Selden is right in saying at the close: "Charlotte is better than her heroines." There are few authors of whom one could say as much.
III.
From England with its maintien compassé, and cold religious tenets, M. Camille Selden takes us to Germany, the land of sentiment and intellectual research, and introduces us to a Jewess in Berlin, that we may see what a German salon was at the end of the eighteenth century.
Rahel Levin was only twenty years old when she lost her father, a wealthy Israelite, gloomy and violent in his bearing at home, but amiable and attractive in society.
The young Rahel, endowed with great intelligence and unerring tact, united to a truly kind heart, was valued and sought by every one as soon as she appeared in society. She was exceedingly amiable, full of an obliging good temper that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy. Rare too was her loyalty; not only was her soul incapable of falsehood, but of any want of sincerity. Her husband who had the good taste not to be jealous of his wife's superiority and success, said of her "that she did not think to lose by showing herself as God had made her, or gain by hiding anything." "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of respect--the rest is only external regularity and conventionality," she often said to those who lavished upon her expressions of respect and admiration.
Unhappily for Mlle. Levin, circumstances concurred in alienating her from her family. Her mother and brothers, notwithstanding their ample fortune, showed a rapacity worthy of their race, and most unlike Rahel's broad and generous ideas; and her position would have been pitiable, but for the illustrious friends who frequented her mother's house. Among them the young girl forgot the petty meanness of her home life; and inexhaustible in ideas, perceptive faculty, and wit, she handled the gravest subjects with delicate skill, and almost as if she were playing with them. Full of unfailing good temper, she could discuss the most varied, the most opposite subjects, without dogmatism or eccentricity.
But this want of union with her family, which had deprived her of the domestic happiness so indispensable to every affectionate woman had rendered her paradoxical and even a little sceptical. See, for example, what she wrote to her youngest sister, who had consulted her about a proposal of marriage: "The want of durability in everything, and the inevitable separation between an object and its [{842}] motive, afford, you see, the final explanation of all that is human. You do not wish to belong to humanity; very well, destroy yourself. I feel quite differently: only transitory things, only what is human can tranquillize and console me." How at variance is this bitterness with the ardent hopefulness of the spiritual Eugénie de Guérin! and how excellent a proof, if we needed any new one, that true happiness is unattainable without that deep religious feeling which raises us above all passing things! Charlotte Brontë had at least that Protestant severity which stifles all tender quailing of the heart and soul, like a miser trembling lest he should lose a farthing of the merits of his sacrifice; but poor Rahel possessed only the intellectual resources of the mind, and they can do little for us.
Goethe, whose countrywoman she was so proud of being; Goethe, little inclined to exaggerate the value of a woman's mind, took pleasure in calling her a generous girl. "She has powerful emotions and a careless way of expressing them," he said: "the better you know her, the more you feel yourself attracted and gently enthralled."
But it was a long time before she enthralled any one. At last one of her friends, Varnhagen von Ense, a young man twenty-six years old, offered her his hand. Let him describe to us the charm of his first interview with Rahel.
"From the first, I must say that she made me experience a very rare happiness, that of contemplating for the first time a complete being--complete in intelligence and heart, a perfect union of nature and cultivation. Everywhere I saw harmony, equilibrium, views as naïve as they were original, striking in their grandeur as in their novelty, and always in accordance with her slightest actions. And all was pervaded with a sentiment of the purest humanity, guided by an energetic sense of duty, and heightened by a noble self-forgetfulness in the presence, of the joys and griefs of others."
Rahel was then thirty-six years old, and this great disparity of age, added to her want of beauty and fortune, must have inspired her with doubts of the duration of a feeling, which perhaps her heart, accustomed to independence, did not at first reciprocate. But in Germany marriages are not made as they are in France; people do not marry without knowing each other, or with a precipitation which might lead one to suppose that on both sides there was something to conceal, or that the intention was to make a good bargain of duty. According to the fashion of their country the two friends were betrothed, and were then forced to separate.
"I am not afraid; I will wait for you; I know you will never forsake me," wrote the indulgent Rahel eight years later, when a Frenchwoman would have lost patience a thousand times over.
In France, where dower, beauty, name, or position, rank before affection, such a separation would certainly have proved fatal. Had he no cause to fear that some one else might supplant him with Rahel? Was she untroubled by dread of the cruel dangers that threaten and disturb the affections? Might not her heart, naturally sceptical, and shaken by contact with the world, distrust the effect of opinion upon so young a man? "But true love has nothing to fear from worldly talk or material considerations; a whiff of a passing breeze cannot destroy strongly rooted affections, whose living germ lies sheltered in the depths of the heart." Such love can wait, for it does not know how to change. Such love was Rahel's; was it Varnhagen's? We shall see.
Rahel was not an author, and had no thought of publication; it was only after her death that her husband sought some slight consolation in publishing her letters. These letters which make three volumes, were written in the course of forty years, and therefore they reveal the different phases of development in the young girl, the independent woman, and the matron. Through the generous feelings which she expresses, with a soul sympathizing with all sorts of interests, there pierces a certain delicate irony which seems to find pleasure in following out to the end any singular or original idea: We feel painfully that this woman has lost much, suffered deeply. In the life of Rahel the Jewess, as in that of Charlotte the Protestant, we discern the absence of our Saviour's cross; we see nowhere the gentle vision of the Virgin Mother.
In one of her letters, Mlle. Levin describes the impression which a visit to a Catholic convent had made upon her mind. She had entered into the services in the chapel like an artist: "I would gladly go there again, if it were only to hear the music, and breathe in the odor of the incense," said she. But the mortifications of the religious seemed to her more eccentric than touching; she pitied them for having to fulfil the functions of gardener and cook, to prepare medicines and feel the pulse of their patients. "Without exception their hands looked coarse," she said, "and their masculine tread sounded like the tramp of a patrol." And yet later in life Rahel was to perform, voluntarily, the same work as these nuns, and moreover she had a true sentiment of piety, which sometimes rose to an expression of faith.
"In moments of suffering," she wrote, "how happy faith makes me feel! I love to rest upon it as on a downy pillow."
We read these words so full of simple piety, with a full heart, thinking sadly how little assistance this woman would have needed to become an ardent convert to the true religion. It is really surprising that she should not have sought out Christianity.
"Never try to suppress a generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling," she wrote to a friend: "despair or discouragement are the only fruits of dry reasoning; examine yourself carefully, and dread above all things the decisions of wisdom unenlightened by the heart."
Rahel and Varnhagen had agreed to meet again one day; but absence is often fatal to the strongest ties, and more than once this one was on the point of snapping.
"A woman who has passed thirty," says our author, "may well fear lest youth, proved by the parish register, should win the day against youth of mind and soul."
It would have been very hard to find a rival to a woman so gifted as Rahel; but the first moment of enthusiasm over, Varnhagen began to think that his betrothed had been very prompt in her acceptance of the promises by which he had bound himself when a young and inexperienced man; and perhaps his memory recalled certain confidences of ill-matched pairs, who had assured him that generosity is a snare.
"For nothing in the world, of course, would he have renounced this affection of which he was proud; but he thought that she would accept his fidelity without his name, and he presumed to offer his devotion in lieu of the projected union."
Rahel could not accept a compromise as humiliating to her heart as dangerous to her reputation. She refused it, but--and this was less dignified--she refused sadly and plainly to free Varnhagen from his engagement. This was what she wrote:
"Bitterness at least equals suffering, when you, the single, solitary soul who knows me thoroughly, would turn away from me, or what is the same thing, when you would be false to yourself, and forsake me: hard words, my friend, but none the less true. I must be severe to the only being who has given me a right to expect anything from him. In you alone had I hoped, and I think I should insult you in saying that I had ceased to hope."
To this bitter trial was added another one, which was very severe, though merely connected with material matters, especially for a person who was no longer young. Half abandoned, and half exploitée by her family, Rahel had become poor. Valiant and strong, she had long succeeded in hiding from her friends the privations which she imposed upon herself, in order to maintain her household properly. She had just lost her mother, and one of her brothers, who died blessing her for her devotion, and these afflictions must be added to the money troubles, which increased every day. Alas! there was no consolation in this distress, for Rahel could not say like the august daughter of a great king, "I thank God for two things; first, for having made me a Christian, and next, for having made me unhappy."
Economy was not her chief virtue, and kindness, that luxury which she could not live without, led her to deprive herself of the necessaries of life, in order that her servants might want for nothing. "It is mere selfishness," she said, laughing; "I prefer spoiling them to spoiling myself."
The misfortunes of war completed the ruin of her purse and her health. She assisted her countrymen by collecting contributions, and when money failed, she paid with personal exertions, fulfilling the admirable precept, "When you have given everything, give yourself." The vehemence of her feelings exhausted her strength, and her frail health gave way beneath the excess of privation and fatigue. She fell ill, and was forced to keep her bed for three months.
Her resources were exhausted, and poverty approached with great strides. She decided to ask one of her brothers, who was rich, to send her a little money; but he not only refused, but took a cruel pleasure in taunting the poor girl, with what he called her crazy liberality.
For six months the war intercepted all communications, so that she could receive no tidings of him whom she still called her betrothed. But this anxiety was the last. On waking one morning Rahel saw a letter which had just been brought in, and by a sudden inspiration, worthy of one who had never despaired, she guessed what this note contained: "a living hope, which never dies out in valiant souls, cried out that at last she had grasped happiness;" and the hope proved true: ten days later she married August Varnhagen, who having recovered from his hesitation, fulfilled his vows with a good will.
"You will never repent marrying me," she wrote to him, with naïveté, a little while before her marriage; "Love me, or love me not, as God wills; whatever happens I shall be yours for ever, you can rely on me: I am constant, as you have been constant. Rahel shall never fail you."
Her husband was afterward made Prussian minister, and Rahel as ambassadress was once more surrounded as in the pleasantest days of her youth.
She was sixty-two years old when the disease attacked her of which she died. Varnhagen never left her, or ceased trying to make her forget her sufferings by reading the books to her which she loved best; and Heinrich Heine, learning that she was ordered to apply fresh rose-leaves to her inflamed eyes, sent her his first poems, lying at the bottom of a basket of exquisite roses.
Madame von Varnhagen had always loved the Bible, and, especially, Jewess though she was, the New Testament. She was never tired of listening to the history of the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. One day finding herself more feeble, she said, taking her husband's hand and pressing it on her heart: "I feel better, my friend. I have been thinking a long time of Jesus, and it seems as if I had never felt as at this moment how truly He is my brother, and the brother of all men. It has comforted me." . . . These were her last words.
Do these women explain the women of our times? It is at least disputable; but we must recognize in them three interesting characters. We will not try to compare them; the differences between them are self-evident; and certainly though Eugénie de Guérin, the Frenchwoman and the Catholic, played in a worldly sense the most obscure part, no person of elevated views can contest the fact that hers was the most beautiful life of the three.
From The Lamp.
HENRI PERREYVE.
The Church of France sustained a great loss when, in the flower of his age, Henri Perreyve was cut off. Had his life been prolonged he would doubtless have attained a high position in the diocese of Paris, and done a very great work. A memorial of him--for it can hardly be called a "Life"--has been recently given to the world by his friend and confidant, Pére Gratry of the French Oratory; and thus the record of this young priest is now made immortal by the eloquent pen of one of the greatest spiritual writers in France. Henri Perreyve was born in April, 1831, and died June, 1865. His was, therefore, but a brief life--brief, but brilliant, like a short, bright summer-day.
The comparison is not an inapt one. The life of this young man was, compared to that of the minority of his fellow-creatures, a bright and happy one. No great exterior sorrows met him during his earthly career; and for the interior, there could not be much real suffering for one who from his early childhood had given himself to God, and who followed the standard of his Divine Master with a courage that could not be dismayed, with an ardor which was never cooled. He was a son of Christian parents, who early discerned his genius, and gave no opposition to the workings of God's grace in him. He was educated at the Lycée St. Louis; but he did not distinguish himself there. He was, however, at the head of the catechism-class in St. Sulpice; for the child's heart was given to God, and he could not devote himself ardently to secular studies until he had learnt to consecrate even them to the service of God. At twelve years old he made his first communion. This act, which is the turning-point in the life of so many, proved such to him. In after-years he thus described it:
"May 29, 1859.
"You know that I always date from my first communion the first call from God to the ecclesiastical state. This thought gives me happiness. I can recall now, as if it were yesterday, the blessed moment when, having received our Lord at the holy table, I returned to my place, and there kneeling on that red-velvet bench, which I can see now, I promised our Lord, with a movement of sincere affection to belong to him always, and to him only. I feel still the kind of certainty I had from that moment of being accepted. I feel the warmth of those first tears for the love of Jesus, which fell from my childish eyes; and the ineffable shrinking of a soul, which for the first time had spoken to God, had seen him and heard him. Intimate and profound joy of the sacerdotal espousals!"
As years passed on, he kept his faith with his Lord. Naturally seeking his friends from among those like-minded with himself, he became soon surrounded by and closely bound to some of the most remarkable and [{846}] devoted men of the day. The Père Gratry was the guide of his youth; and among those who followed his direction were a group of young ardent men, burning to devote themselves to the cause of God and his Church. Meeting a little later on with the Père Pététot, they became the foundation-stones of the newly-revived French Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Henri Perreyve was obliged, however, before long, by the feebleness of his health, to withdraw from the congregation; but he was ever linked to it by the ties of the closest affection. Père Charles Perraud, one of the Oratorians, was throughout life his bosom friend. They learnt together and prayed together, and were called together to serve God in the priesthood. Charles Perraud was the first to attain this dignity; and on the occasion of his saying his first mass, Henri thus wrote to him.
"Hyères, Dec. 16, 1857.
"May the Lord be with thee! These are the sacramental words of the deacon, the only ones I have the right of addressing to you, my dear friend and brother, before the holy altar. I address them to you with all the fulness of my heart, and with all the deep meaning that befits these holy words. Yes, may the Lord be with you, dear brother!
"With you this morning at the altar of your first mass, to accept your bridal promise, and reply to your perpetual vow by that reciprocal love which passes all other love. With you during the whole of this great day, to maintain the perfume of celestial incense in your soul, and the odor of the sacrifice which has begun, but which--thanks be to God!--has no ending. With you to-morrow, to make you feel that joy in God has somewhat of eternity in it, and that it differs from the joys of earth because we can taste it constantly without ever exhausting it. With you when, soon after your holy ecstasy of joy, you will feel that you must be a priest for men; and you will go down from Mount Tabor to go to those who suffer, to those who are ignorant, to those who are hungering and thirsting for the true light and the true life. With you in your sorrows to console you; with you in your joys to sanctify them; with you in your desires to make them fruitful.
"'Memor sit omnis sacrificii tui,
et holocaustum tuum pingue fiat. '
"With you, my Charles, if you are alone in life, if our friendship be taken from you, if you have to walk on leaning only on the arm of a Divine Friend.
"With you, young priest, with you growing old in the conflicts of the priesthood, and in the service of God and men. With you on the day of your death, which shall bring to your lips, by the hands of another, that same Jesus who has so often been carried to others by your trembling hands.
"O my friend! I gather up all that my heart can contain of happy desires, wishes, and hopes for you. I gather them all up in one single wish: May the Lord be with thee always!
"It will be the life of a holy priest on earth; one day it will be heaven.
"The Lord be with thee!
"My Charles, bless me! I embrace yon tenderly, and feel myself with you pressed against the Heart of the Divine Master, beloved for ever.
"Henri Perreyve."
Henri Perreyve was advancing rapidly toward manhood when the Providence of God threw him in the path of one who was to exercise a powerful influence over his future. While Henri was a boy at school. Father Lacordaire held the pulpit of Notre Dame; and it might truly be said, "All Paris was moved." What those wonderful conferences did toward undoing the fatal spiritual havoc wrought at the Revolution, and in subsequent years, cannot be recorded in any mortal history. It was given to men to see somewhat of the result of the labor; but the seeds of eternal life are scattered broadcast by a preacher's hand, and fall hither and thither unknown to any but God.
Henri Perreyve, as a boy of thirteen, found his delight in listening to the conferences. Six years passed by, and found him still the attentive disciple at the feet of the great master of minds at that period; but he was too diffident and retiring to seek a personal acquaintance. One day, however, a friend insisted on introducing him. Father Lacordaire was busy, and the interview lasted but a moment; but Henri Perreyve resembled the ideal we may not unreasonably form of the young man on whom our Lord looked and loved. Nature had been prodigal of her gifts, and genius and innocence lent additional charm to his exterior beauty. Lacordaire's keen eye had discerned the treasures that could be developed in that ardent soul.
A few days after this hasty introduction, Henri was astonished by the entrance of the great Dominican into his room.
"I received you very ill the other day," he said; "I come to ask your pardon, and talk with you."
From that day began the closest friendship and intimacy between them. They were literally like father and son; and at the death of Lacordaire he bequeathed to his dear friend all that a poor monk had to leave--his letters and papers. Henri Perreyve is said to have been the being on earth best loved by Lacordaire. "You shall be," wrote the latter to him, "forever in my heart as a son and as a friend." Henri, by the pure devotion of his early youth to God, had deserved some great gift, and it was given to him in the friendship of Lacordaire. That the rest of his life was spent in an earnest endeavor to imitate his friend, we can scarcely wonder at Had he lived, no doubt he would have been a second Lacordaire; but the "sword wore out the sheath," the frail body could not sustain the burning soul within. Lacordaire died in the prime of life, Perreyve in the flower of his youth.
A few more years from the time we are speaking of and he was made priest. Work poured in on him. "The work of ten priests was offered to him day by day." He refused a good deal; but what he reserved would have been enough for three, and he had most feeble health.
He was preacher at the Sorbonne, director of the Conferences of St. Barbe, "sermons everywhere, special works on all sides, endless correspondence, confessions, directions, reunions of young people, incessant visits."
Frequent illness attacked him, and obliged him to withdraw for a time from his labors; but he returned to them with new zest. Of his literary works the one most generally admired is the "Journée des Malades." Here his genius was aided by that personal experience of illness which enables a person so readily to enter into the feelings of another. But many can know and feel the weariness and temptations which beset a sick person, and be very incapable of putting it into words, while M. Perreyve's "Journée des Malades" will comfort many a heart.
His "Rosa Ferrucci," an exquisitely written little biography, is already to some extent known to our readers. He likewise published "Méditations sur le Chemin de la Croix; Entretiens sur l'Eglise Catholique;" and he edited with the greatest care, and wrote an introduction for, the celebrated Letters from Father Lacordaire to young people. He also wrote a "Station at the Sorbonne," and "Poland," besides various little brochures.
The chief work of the Abbé Perreyve was the guidance and influence over young men and boys.
The Conferences at St. Barbe were listened to by a most attentive auditory of this class, and his power over his hearers was large and increasing.
"He possessed in a rare degree," says Père Gratry, "that sacred art of speaking to men, of speaking to each one, and yet speaking to all. Hence the universal success of his discourses."
One of the great orators of the day, after hearing him preach at the Sorbonne, exclaimed, "He who has not heard that, does not know how far human eloquence can go."
The Count de Montalembert was one day among the audience. He wrote afterward: "I have been touched and delighted in a way I have not been for twenty years; since the time when he of whom you are the worthy successor enchanted my youth at Nôtre Dame."
But as the Père Gratry justly observes, his success in colleges such as the Lycée St. Louis and St. Barbe is still more remarkable than that at the Sorbonne. One secret of it might be found in an acknowledgment that he made to his friend. He had for these [{848}] young people such a love, such a respect, such an idea of the possible future of each soul, such an esteem of the hidden treasures in each heart, that he seemed to hold the key of their souls, and to come before them as the friend of each.
On one occasion he had to speak on the most delicate and difficult topic it was possible a priest could have to deal with before such an assembly. He told a story: he spoke of a death which he had witnessed, and of the crime which had caused that death; a crime which is not punished by human laws, but which works ruin and death on all sides.
"And this man," said he, with that voice of his which thrilled to the hearts of his hearers--"and this man is in society honorable and refined; perhaps even not without religion. Gentlemen, is this the honor that shall be yours, and is this the religion which you will have?"
Never can those who heard him that day forget it; they were moved to the very depths of their souls, and tears flowed from the eyes of those who are not easily made to weep. When he had concluded, many of his auditors gathered around him said: "Thanks, sir; you have opened our eyes for ever."
The popularity of M. Perreyve survived even the severe trial of having to address the boys of the preparatory school and the students of St. Barbe at an hour on Sunday which would otherwise have been at their own disposal. The sermon was to be given every fortnight, and the audience the first time were in anything but an amiable mood. The next day a petition was sent up by them that the sermons might be given every week.
Thus his life passed away; and the end hurried on all too rapidly for those who loved him and hung upon his words. His lungs were again affected, and he passed the last winter of his life m the south of France. There he thought he had improved, and wrote flattering accounts of himself; so that when he returned to Paris on Palm Sunday, April the 9th, his family and friends were in consternation at his altered looks. Doctors could not reassure them, and the complaint made rapid progress. It was a terrible confirmation of his relatives' fears when they found he was unconscious of his danger, and, like all those in the same fatal disease, busy in making plans for the future. He planned how he should resume his sermons at the Sorbonne, even while he was too weak to bear the fasting necessary for his Easter Communion; and it was with great difficulty, and leaning on the arm of his friend the Abbé Bernard, that he communicated on May 1st in the little chapel of our Lady of Sion, close to his home. He then went into the country, where he rallied for a short time, and then grew rapidly worse. The news of his change spread amongst those who loved him because they knew him, and those who loved him because they knew his worth in the Church.
A "league" of prayers was organized for his recovery, and Henri began to realize his state. He looked the prospect calmly in the face. Fame, opportunities for doing good, the love and esteem of friends, were instantly and willingly resigned.
"I think of death, and accept it without regret or fear. I am grateful for all these prayers for me; but I do not desire life. I cannot pray with that intention."
Then he thought of his sins, and his unworthiness, and of the Divine Face he was about to behold; and he shrank back. He was reminded of the mercy of God. "Truly," he said, "I who have so often preached to others the mercy of God ought to trust in it myself."
His greatest grief was the rarity of his communions. He consoled himself by saying: "Missionaries are often obliged to pass a long time without communion, and then one feels God also by privation."
A love of solitude began to grow on him, for he was preparing himself to be alone with God. When begged to try a new treatment, he consented, saying, "I ask myself, as I often do, what would Père Lacordaire have done in my place? It seems to me he would have thought it an indication of Providence."
He returned to Paris; and every effort of medical science was made to arrest the malady, but all in vain. An alarming fainting fit on the 14th of June made his friends fear death was nearer to him than they had imagined, and the Abbé Bernard thought it right to warn him.
"You surprise me," he said quietly. "I thought myself very ill, but not so near death; but it is so much the better; you must give me the holy viaticum and extreme unction."
The abbé went to fetch the blessed sacrament and holy oils from St. Sulpice, the parish church of their childhood, of their first communion, where they had prayed and wept together, where they had asked many things from God, where they had together been consecrated priests. There their whole Christian life had run by; and now one had come to fetch for the other divine succor for his last hours.
The invalid insisted on rising, and was dressed in his cassock to receive the holy sacraments. Père Gratry and other friends were present. "I can see him now," says the former, "as full of grace and energy as ever, smiling as usual, and saying, 'I am in perfect peace, dear father--in perfect peace.' I shall remember that sight all my life, thank God; that noble bearing, that face pale as marble, those large speaking eyes, his tender glance, and his last words, 'in perfect peace.'" He made his profession of faith, begged pardon of all whom he had offended or scandalized, thanked all for the kindness they had shown him; and implored them "not to say, as was too often done, 'he is in heaven;' but to pray much for him after his death." Then he said the "Te Deum" in thanksgiving for all the mercies of his life; and at last he said to his friend, "You cannot think what interior joy I feel since you told me I was going to die."
The next day the Archbishop of Paris came to see him. He would be dressed in his cassock to receive the visit, and would kneel for the bishop's blessing. He then had a long private conversation with him.
To this dying chamber came some of the most celebrated names in Paris: Père Pététot, the Count do Montalembert, the Prince de Broglie, Augustin Cochin, Mgr. Buguet, the Vicar-general, the curé of St. Sulpice, General Zamoiski, and a hundred others. One of them said, "We are a long way off from knowing now what he is. We shall know it one day." "Dear friend," said he to Father Adolphe Perreud of the Oratory, "we shall not cease to work together for the cause of God and his church. Before you leave me, give me your blessing." "On condition you give me yours," said the Oratorian; and blessing each other, the friends parted for ever on earth. His bodily sufferings were severe. His bones were nearly through his skin, and his cough shook him to pieces. He grew weaker and weaker, and at last the end came. "Give me the crucifix, sister," said he to the nursing sister who attended on him; "not mine, but yours, that has so often rested on dying lips. If I die to-morrow, mother, it will be my first communion anniversary." "Dear child," she answered, weeping, "we were both happy that day." "Well," he answered, "we must be still happier to-morrow."
The agony came on; he kissed the crucifix again and again, murmuring, "Lord, have pity on me; Jesus, take me soon; Jesus, soon." Suddenly a great terror seized him; his eyes were dilated with fear, gazing at something invisible to all around; and he cried out, "I am afraid, I am afraid."
The Abbé Bernard said, "You most not fear God; abandon yourself to his mercy, and say, In thee, Lord, have I hoped; let me not be confounded for ever."
He looked at him and said, "It is not God whom I fear; oh! no. I fear that they will prevent my dying." Then he grew calm.
The abbé brought him the cross of Père Lacordaire, and said, "My God, I love thee with all my heart in time and in eternity."
"Oh! yes, with all my heart," he said, kissing the image of his Lord. It was his last act and his last words.
"Depart, O Christian soul!" prayed his friends Charles and Adolphe Perreud.
"I absolve thee from all thy sins," said the Abbé Bernard; and in a few minutes the last struggle was over, and his soul was set free.
Among his papers was found the following:
"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I die in the faith of the Catholic Church, to whose service since I was twelve years old I have had the happiness of consecrating my life.
"I tenderly bless my relations and friends; I implore all those who remember me to pray for a long time for my soul, that God, turning away from the sight of my sins, may deign to receive me into the place of eternal rest and happiness. I bless once again all those who are dear to me--my relations, my benefactors, my masters, my fathers and brothers in the priesthood, my spiritual sons, the number of dear young people who have loved me, all the souls to whom I have been united on earth by the tie of the same faith and the same love in Jesus Christ."
The inscription on his tomb was chosen by himself:
"Lord, when I have seen thy glory, I shall be satisfied with it."
These words were as a key to his life. An insatiable, ardent desire for God had possessed him, animated his actions; and at last the very ardor of his longings wore out the feeble body that enclosed so grand and beautiful a soul.
From The Dublin University Magazine.
SONNET.
Upon a rose-tree bending o'er a river
A bird from spring to summer gaily sang;
For love of its sweet friend, the rose, for ever
Its beating heart with happy music rang,
In sunshine warm and moonlight by the shore,
Whose waves afar its voice melodious bore,
Blent with its own. But when, alas! the sere
Grey autumn came, withering those blooms so dear,
Still full of love but full of sadness too,
Changed the sweet song as changed the rose's hue
Mourning each day some rich leaf disappear
Until the last had dropped into the stream,
Anguished by wintry breezes blowing keen.
Then, on the bough forlorn, mute as a dream.
Awhile the poor bird clung, and soon was seen no more.
From Once a Week.
CARDINAL TOSTI.
BY BESSIE RAYNOR PARKER.
It was in the afternoon of Friday, the 23d of March, that Rome heard of the death of the "learned and venerable Tosti." This aged cardinal, long the director of the great establishment of San Michele, (which is a hospital and school combined,) had attained to nearly ninety years. Now he was dead, and laid out in state in his own room at San Michele, whither we went about five o'clock, and, threading the vast corridors, which run round a court blossoming with oranges and lemons, ascending a long flight of stone stairs, got into upper regions filled with a perceptible hum, soldier sentinels stationed by the opened doors, who motioned us on from room to room till we came to the last of all. These rooms were perfectly empty of all furniture, save a few book-cases under glass; but the yellow satin walls of one, and the delicately-tinted panels of another, showed that they had but lately formed the private apartments of him who was gone. Three or four temporary altars were erected in the empty space, adorned by tall unlighted candles. A thrill crept over us as we neared that last open door, a silent sentinel at either side; as we crossed the antechamber, and came in a direct line with the aperture, we saw a figure, splendidly attired, reposing on a great sloping couch of cloth of gold. The face of this figure indicated extreme age; the brow was surmounted by the bright scarlet berretta, which caught the light from the setting sun. The shrunken frame was clothed in the soft purple of its ecclesiastical rank. The hands were crossed and held a crucifix; the feet were turned up in new and pointed shoes. There he lay, Cardinal Tosti, who for five-and-twenty years was the handsomest of all the Sacred Conclave, and towered above his brethren when they walked in procession, drawing the admiration of beholders.
There was no sound, as we knelt by the dead man's couch; through the window could be seen the swift Tiber, swollen by the recent rains, and on the other side of the river rose the green slopes of the half-deserted Aventine, with its few solitary churches, Santa Sabina, Santa Alessio, and its gracious crown of trees. Here had Tosti dwelt for many a year, in rooms which looked to the golden west. Here he occupied himself with his books, and with the school for industrial and artistic pursuits which was due to his efforts at San Michele. I have never seen anything so marvellously picturesque and impressive as that dead man, lying on his couch of cloth of gold, the closing scene of a long life, which stretched back far beyond the wars of the first Napoleon, even to the period when Papal Rome received the royal refugees of the French Revolution.
Presently, a group of white-robed priests entered, and began reciting the office for the dead. This was the signal for the gathering of a little crowd of Romans. Brown-cowled monks, peasant women with their children in arms, boys and girls with large wondering dark eyes. Together they crowded to the door of the dead man's chamber, and knelt upon the floor, so that above and [{852}] beyond their bowed heads could be seen that pale splendor upon its shining couch. We left with reluctant footsteps, feeling a fascination in the picture which it is hard to describe.
Late in the evening, an hour after the Ave, the corpse was to be conveyed by torch-light to Santa Cecilia, the cardinal's titular church; and at Santa Cecilia we found ourselves in the starry night. The torches were just entering the church as we drove up; and for some minutes the doors were inexorably shut, and we feared we had lost all chance of an entrance. But we were presently admitted, and saw indeed a striking scene! The small church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, famous as being built upon the site of the young martyr's dwelling, was draped in black and gold from ceiling to pavement, and where the altar-piece is generally to be seen was a great flat gold cross on a black ground. The sanctuary was greatly enlarged for the morrow's service, and hung with black; and in the nave, not very far from the great portal, rose a large empty couch, exactly resembling that which we had seen in the cardinal's private chamber. At its foot was a low bier, whereon now lay the same white image of a man in its purple robes, and a group of attendants crowded reverentially around it, flashing torches in their hands, which formed a centre of light in the dark church, reminding one of the famous Correggio; only, instead of the new-born Babe, the illumination of humanity for all time to come, was the aged dead, no longer capable of communicating the living light of intelligence or of faith, but lying in a pale reflection under the torches, and gathering into itself all the meaning of the whole scene.
We perceived that something remarkable was about to take place, and retired discreetly behind a pillar, that our accidental presence might attract no notice. The truth was, that the cardinal was about to be laid out for the great funeral service of the morrow; and by chance we had gained admission at this purely private hour. The body was taken on the little bier into the sacristy, and there we supposed that some change was made in the raiment; when it was brought back the hands were gloved, and instead of the scarlet berretta was a plain skull-cap. Then, with difficulty and much consultation, but with perfect reverence of intention, the straight image was lifted on to the great couch; the assistant men being grouped on ladders, and an eager voluble monsignore directing the whole. The ladders, the torch-light, the mechanical difficulty of the operation, again reminded me of one of those great depositions in which the actual scene of the Cross is so vividly brought out by art. At length the dead cardinal lay placidly upon his cloth of gold, and they fetched his ring to put upon his hand, and his white mitre wherewith to clothe his gray hairs. We left them performing the last careful offices, making the strangest, the most gorgeous torch-light group in the middle of that dark church that poet or artist could conceive.
The next morning the Pope and the College of Cardinals came to officiate at the funeral mass. The square court in front of Santa Cecilia was filled with an eager crowd of Romans and Forestieri, with the splendid costumes of the Papal Guard, with prancing horses and old-fashioned chariots, gorgeous with gilding and color. They were much such a company of equipages as may be seen in our Kensington Museum, but so fresh and well-appointed in spite of the extreme antiquity of their design, that one felt as if carried back to the days of Whittington, Lord Mayor of London. Into Santa Cecilia itself we could not penetrate, by reason of the crowd and the stern vigilance of the soldiers, who, attired in the red-and-yellow costume designed by Michael Angelo, kept a considerable space in the nave empty for the moment when the Pope should walk from the altar to the bier. But [{853}] through the open door we saw the lights upon the black-draped altar and in front of that gorgeous couch, with its motionless occupant, his white mitre being now the conspicuous point in the picture. And when the Pope left the dim church and came out into the sunshine, the brilliant rays fell upon his venerable white hair and scarlet cap, while the weapons flashed and the crowd shouted, as he ascended his wonderful chariot with the black horses, and drove away.