The Souls of Animals
A number of years ago, when the census enumerators were going through Canada, they found an old lady in Quebec, who, to the question what religion she professed, replied that she believed in the transmigration of souls. To what particular form of the doctrine she clung; whether she believed, with the sages of the Ganges, that the soul begins its life in the mineral or vegetable world, and must pass through no fewer than eighty-eight progressive stages before it rises to human consciousness; or, with the priests of the Nile, that the spiritual part of a man has lived for three thousand years in the forms of lower animals before it gets a human body; whether she was a Pythagorean, or a Neo-Platonist, or a Cabalist; whether she refused animal food for fear of eating unwittingly the flesh of some deceased friend or relative, and could not see a roast chicken without thinking of a cannibal; these are curious questions which we fear will never be answered. Plato believed in ten grades of migrations, each of a thousand years, in which souls were purified and punished before their return to an incorporeal existence with God; and the more virtuously they lived, the fewer grades they had to pass through. For a good, honest philosopher, about three grades were thought sufficient. Porphyry taught that bodies themselves are punishments imposed upon souls for offences committed in a previous state of which we retain no consciousness. A gross, sensual, very material body indicated a very criminal career in the previous existence. A virtuous life led by degrees through the states of heroes, angels, and archangels; and an archangel, if he behaved himself, might hope to be absorbed, in the course of time, into the divine essence itself; while for the wicked there was a similar but descending scale of transformations into devils of various degrees of moral blackness. The Cabalists held that God created originally a certain number of Jewish souls, some of which are still on earth in human form, while there are always many others doing penance for their sins in the bodies of animals. So they were careful, we trust, in their treatment of dumb beasts, not knowing but any pig or jackass they encountered might be a Jew in disguise. A conscientious Cabalist would not dare turn a dog out of doors, for fear he might be kicking his grandfather, and ought to shun fish, flesh, and fowl as religiously as he would object to dining off a blood relation. The great Christian philosopher, Origen, himself believed in the transmigration of the souls of men into the bodies of the lower animals; and adopted this doctrine as the readiest way of explaining why there are so many imperfections in animated nature; the divine Creator purposely made animals imperfect, because he meant that bodies should be the instruments of punishment and expiation for sinful souls. The Gnostics, and Manichaeans, and some other heretical sects, had the same idea, and it was also a part of the doctrine of the ancient British Druids, as it is at the present day of the Druses and other tribes of Asia, as well as of some of the African nations. Fourier allowed the soul no fewer than eight hundred and ten lives, each of them averaging a hundred years in duration, and it was to pass one third, or twenty-seven thousand of all these years, on our earth. When all the transmigrations had been accomplished, the soul was to lose its separate existence, and become confounded with the soul of the planet. But the French philosopher did not stop here. The body of the planet was to be in its turn destroyed, and its soul to transmigrate into a new earth, rising by successive stages to the highest degrees in the hierarchy of worlds.
Which of these many systems of metempsychosis was the one embraced by the eccentric old lady of Quebec we have, as we said before, no means of deciding, nor perhaps, since she appears to have founded no school of disciples, is the problem worth investigation. We can imagine what a singular position the solitary adherent of that old pagan creed must have occupied in the society of the quaint French city; how pious Catholics must have stared at her with mingled awe and horror as a relic of the times of Pythagoras and Plato, or perchance as an Indian Buddhist some centuries old, whom Time in his flight had forgotten to gather into his garner, where all her kith and kin had been laid asleep for ages. It was certainly a very uncomfortable belief, and, if it ever became general, it would play the mischief with family relations. Just think of the possibility of a man's being his own grandmother or his own posthumous son! It may have had its conveniences, but, upon the whole, we are glad it has died out.
We once heard an accomplished theologian maintain that, however philosophically absurd that doctrine might be, and however inconsistent with the spirit of Catholic teaching, there was yet no dogmatic decision which forbade a man's holding it, if he chose to be such a fool. A man might be a good Catholic and still believe that one of God's ways of punishing sin was to imprison the offending soul after death in the body of a beast; this might be a sort of purgatory. Perhaps he was right; but so we might say there is no article of faith which forbids us to believe that the moon is made of green cheese, that the earth is flat instead of round, that the Rocky Mountains are five thousand miles high, or that King Arthur was the first President of the United States. There is a sort of transmigration, however, in which reputable Catholic theologians are not altogether unwilling to believe; and this brings us to the statement of a fact which, for all that it is admitted by the mass of authorities on such subjects, will, no doubt, sound paradoxical to a great many of our readers; that is, that dumb beasts, if they have not borrowed the souls of human beings, have, at any rate, souls of their own. In our loose way of talking about things, we are but too apt to speak of the soul as one of the distinguishing prerogatives of man, and reason as another; whereas the fact is that man shares both these in common with the brute kingdom. Every animal has a soul, though not an immortal soul; and all the higher animals—probably all animals—are gifted to a greater or less extent with reason. Deny souls to beasts, and you reduce them to a level with the vegetable creation, in which life and motion are merely the necessary operations of external laws which the plant has no power either to further or obstruct. Nor need we fear that, by admitting they have souls, we raise them too near an equality with ourselves. The divine gift of immortality, the power of knowing and loving God, the right to participate in his everlasting glory—these are distinctions which must separate us by an immeasurable gulf from all inferior creatures. If beasts have no souls, it will puzzle us to define the exact difference between a dead dog and a live one.
But we have wandered away, from our speculations about metempsychosis, and are apparently in danger of forgetting the proposition which we set forth in the last paragraph, namely, that there is a certain kind of transmigration of souls in which many good theologians seem very much inclined to believe. It is an open question whether the souls of animals pass from body to body; whether, for instance, when a dog dies, its soul is annihilated, or is transferred to the body of another brute just that moment born; whether the souls of the lower orders of creatures have only the brief life which appears to be granted them, or whether their existence may not be prolonged to the end of this world. It certainly accords with what we know of the divine economy, in which everything has its permanent use and no created object seems ever to be destroyed, to suppose that, after a soul has performed its functions in the body of one beast, it may be designed by Almighty God to perform similar functions in the body of another. The plant which springs up, and blossoms, and withers, returns to life in other forms; a part of it is consumed as food and passes into the tissue of animals; a part crumbles away into vegetable mould and is assimilated by the parent earth; a part, dissolving into the constituents of the atmosphere, serves to nourish and increase other plants. The animal body itself, which decays and is changed to dust, is destined to live again in other shapes. Modern science has discovered that not even a motion is lost. The blow of the hammer which is struck upon the anvil is perpetuated in one form or another through all time. The heat of the fire which blazes for an hour and is then extinct was not created at the moment the fire was kindled, and will not be lost when the fire goes out. The sum of all the forces which act in nature is constant, unchangeable. Heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, may be expended and apparently lost, but it is only to manifest themselves in other ways. Nothing, in a word, seems to be destroyed, and, so far as our knowledge enables us to judge, God has never annihilated any material object which he has once created. And if matter is thus preserved through various changes, processes of decay and processes of renovation, why should not spirit be likewise kept in existence? The soul of man, after it leaves this body, has still eternal functions to perform in another world, either of punishment or of reward. What objection is there, then, to believing that the incorporeal part of the brute has permanent use in this world as long as the world endures?
Perhaps when we have learned to look upon the brute soul as something rather more honorable than we have been wont to regard it; as something which it is quite possible (we won't say probable) God may have designed to last till the very end of time, and not as the creature of one short day, we may be prepared to recognize in its true dignity the brute's power of reason, which seems naturally to follow from the possession of a soul. It is a common fallacy to distinguish the intelligent faculty in man as reason, and in dumb animals as instinct. The truth is, reason and instinct are two things quite different in kind; neither takes the place of the other, and each of them belongs both to man and to beast. Without aiming at strict philosophical accuracy, we may define reason as the faculty by which we weigh the relations of things, and freely and deliberately choose what we deem eligible, and reject what we consider hurtful. Instinct is an innate force or impulse inciting us under certain circumstances to act in a certain way. For example, if a man walking on a plank should feel it unexpectedly shift under his feet, he would catch at the nearest object, or endeavor to balance his body by stretching out his hands. These acts would be acts of instinct, done on the impulse of the moment, before reason had time to consider whether they ought to be done or not. Max Müller has some excellent remarks on this subject in his Lectures on the Science of Language. Instinct, he observes, is more prominent in brutes than in man; but it exists in both, as much as intellect is shared by both. "A child takes his mother's breast by instinct; the spider weaves its net by instinct; the bee builds her cell by instinct. No one would ascribe to the child a knowledge of physiology because it employs the exact muscles which are required for sucking; nor shall we claim for the spider a knowledge of mechanics, or for the bee an acquaintance with geometry, because we could not do what they do without a study of these sciences. But what if we tear a spider's web, and see the spider examining the mischief that is done, and either giving up his work in despair, or endeavoring to mend it as well as may be? Surely here we have the instinct of weaving controlled by observation, by comparison, by reflection, by judgment." Brutes indeed have all the faculties which pertain to reasoning beings. They have sensation, perception, will, memory, and intellect. They see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, just like ourselves. They experience sensations of pleasure and pain, a dog that is fondled or chastised behaving exactly as a child would behave under the same circumstances. They are able to compare and distinguish; they show signs of shame and pride, of love and hatred. To admit all this, and deny that they have souls and reason, is merely to dispute about terms.
An interesting little book has just been published in England on The Reasoning Power in Animals, by the Rev. John Selby Watson, and we purpose giving our readers a few illustrative anecdotes from this work, together with some instances that have fallen under our own observation, confirmatory of the principles we have stated in the preceding pages.
Seneca denied memory to beasts. When a horse, he says, for instance, has travelled along a road and is brought the same way again, he recognizes it; but in the stable he remembers nothing of it. This, however, cannot be proved. Almost every one has seen a dog dreaming, and acting over in his dreams what he has done in his waking moments. If he thinks of events and places in his sleep, why should he not think of them awake? And if a dog can think of them, why cannot a horse? The stories of the memory of elephants are numberless. One of these animals was being exhibited some years ago in the west of England, when a practical joker among the spectators dealt out to him in small quantities some gingerbread nuts, and, after he had secured the elephant's confidence, presented him with a large parcel weighing several pounds. The beast swallowed it at once, but, finding it too hot, roared with pain, and handed his bucket to the keeper, as if asking for water, and, as soon as he had quenched his thirst, hurled the bucket with great force at the joker's head, fortunately missing his aim. A year afterward the elephant returned to the same place, and among the spectators was the joker, again provided with sweet cakes and hot cakes. He gave the elephant two or three from the best packet, and then offered a hot one. But no sooner had the animal proved the pungency of it than he seized the coat-tails of his tormentor, and whirled him aloft in the air, until, the tails giving way, he fell prostrate to the ground, half dead with fright. The elephant then quietly inserted his trunk into the pocket containing the best nuts, and, with his foot on the coat-tails, leisurely despatched every one of them. When he had finished, he trampled the hot nuts to a mash, tore the coat-tails to tatters, and flung the rags at the discomfited joker. The old story of the elephant revenging himself by spirting dirty water over a tailor who had wounded him with a needle is too well known to be repeated. A similar story is related in Captain Shipp's Memoirs. The captain had given an elephant cayenne pepper with bread and butter, and six weeks afterward the animal remembered it and punished Captain Shipp by drenching him with dirty water.
Dogs have excellent memories, and every child is familiar with narratives of their recollecting murderers and leading to their detection. The celebrated story of the dog of Montargis, who killed the assassin of his master; of the dog who pointed out to Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, two soldiers who had slain his master, as related by Plutarch; of the dog of Antioch, commemorated by St. Ambrose; and of a dog who, according to Giraldus Cambrensis, in the thirteenth century, fought a public combat with a suspected murderer, a sort of wager-of-battle, in fact, in which the dog proved his case, are examples of this memory. Benvenuto Cellini had a watch-dog that drove away a burglar who tried one night to break into the house, and some time afterward recognized the thief in the street and seized him. A lady removing from Poitou to Paris left a spaniel behind her. Ten years afterward she sent some clothes packed by herself to the person who had charge of the dog. The little creature no sooner smelt them than he gambolled round them and showed every mark of excessive joy.
The horse has an excellent memory both for persons and places. He never forgets a road he has once travelled. A horse accustomed to be employed once a week on a journey with the newsman of a provincial paper always stopped at the houses of the several customers, sixty or seventy in number. There were two persons on the route who took one paper between them, and each claimed the privilege of having it first on the alternate Sunday. The horse soon became accustomed to this regulation; and, though the parties lived two miles apart, he stopped at the door of each in his regular turn. Here was certainly a very remarkable exercise of memory. A wonderful example of the use of the same faculty is seen in the facility with which animals that have been carried away from home find their way back. The writer had a Newfoundland slut which was sent away with one of her pups a considerable distance by railroad, shut up in a box-car. A fortnight afterward Jet and her offspring were found at their old home, foot-sore and half starved. How they had made their way back over roads which they could only have seen in occasional glimpses from the door of the car always remained a mystery. But far more wonderful instances of canine memory than this are on record. A terrier that was taken from Arundel to London in a close cart, and tied up in the evening in a yard near Grosvenor square, was found at Arundel, sixty miles distant, the following afternoon. A Scotch dog having been taken to Frankfort, and having there seen its master drowned in the Oder, after having made ineffectual efforts to save him, found its way from Frankfort to Hamburg, from Hamburg to Hull, and from Hull to Edinburgh. Lord Lonsdale sent two hounds from Leicestershire to Ireland, and at the end of three weeks they reappeared in Leicestershire. A Mr. Edward Cook, having lived some time with his brother at Togsten in Northumberland, came to America, bringing with him a pointer dog, which, while shooting in the woods near Baltimore, he lost. Some time afterward Mr. Cook's brother, who continued to reside at Togsten, was aroused one night by the barking of a dog, which, on being let in, proved to be the lost pointer. He remained there until his master came back from America. By what vessel he had made his way across the Atlantic was never ascertained. The persistency with which cats will return to places from which they have been sent away is well known. Lord Brougham, in his Letters on Instinct, mentions one that was taken to the West Indies, and on the return of the ship to London, found her way through the city to Brompton, whence she had been taken. Mrs. Lee tells the following story in her Anecdotes of Animals:
"When living at Four Paths, Clarendon, Jamaica, I wanted a cat, and had one given to me which was nearly full-grown. It was brought from Morgan's Valley estate, where it was bred, and had never been removed from that place before. The distance was five miles. It was put into a canvas bag, and carried by a man on horseback. Between the two places there are two rivers, one of them about eighty feet broad and two and a half deep, and over these rivers there are no bridges. The cat was shut up at Four Paths for some days, and when considered to be reconciled to her new dwelling she was allowed to go about the house. The day after obtaining her liberty she was missing, and upon my next visiting the estate she was brought from, I was quite amazed to learn that the cat had come back again. Did she swim over the rivers at the fords where the horse came through with her, or did she ascend the banks for a considerable distance in search of a more shallow place, and where the stream was less powerful? At all events, she must have crossed the rivers in opposition to her natural habits."
A farmer living on the borders of the New Forest in Hampshire, bought a mare near Newport, in the Isle of Wight, and took it home with him, crossing to the main-land in a boat. During the night the animal escaped from the enclosure in which the farmer had fastened it, and made its way home again, swimming across the strait. The nearest distance from the Hampshire coast to the Isle of Wight is five miles. A cow which had been sent to grass at a place twenty-one miles from her owner's residence remained there contentedly all summer; but, as soon as the grass began to fail, travelled home to her old pasturage. A cow was separated from her young calf and driven twelve miles to Smithfield to be sold, but early the next morning she was found at home, having escaped from the market and made her way through all the intricacies of London. Dr. John Brown, in one of his inimitable dog-papers, gives an instance of a dog finding his way home from a distance, under circumstances which almost seem to justify his notion that the canine race have an idea of humor. A Scottish shepherd, having sold his sheep at a market, was asked by the buyer to lend him his dog to take them home. "'By a' manner o' means take Birkie, and when ye'r dune wi' him just play so,' (making a movement with his arm,) 'and he'll be hame in a jiffy.' Birkie was so clever, and useful, and gay, that the borrower coveted him; and on getting to his farm shut him up, intending to keep him. Birkie escaped during the night, and took the entire hirsel (flock) back to his own master! Fancy him trotting across the moor with them, they as willing as he."
There are some well-authenticated instances of animals finding their way home by roads they never travelled before which are difficult of explanation. In March, 1816, an ass, the property of Captain Dundas, R. N., was shipped at Gibraltar on board the Ister frigate, bound for Malta. The vessel having grounded off Point de Gat, the animal was thrown overboard to give it a chance of swimming ashore—a poor one, for the land was some distance off and the sea running very high. A few days afterward, however, when the gates of Gibraltar were opened in the morning, the ass presented himself for admittance, and proceeded to a stable which he had formerly occupied. He had not only swum ashore, but, without guide, compass, or travelling map, and with no previous knowledge of the route, had travelled from Point de Gat to Gibraltar, a distance of more than two hundred miles, through a mountainous and intricate country intersected by streams; and he had done it in so short a time that he could hardly have made single false turn. What directed him on this wonderful journey it is impossible to conjecture, unless we suppose that he had the good sense to follow the line of the coast; and that he should have known that such a course would lead him home certainly argues a very large share of the reasoning faculty. In point of fact, however, there is a curious and incomprehensible instinct for finding the way which belongs not only to the lower animals, but to man himself in the savage state. The migrations of birds afford familiar examples of it, swallows especially, returning year after year to build their nests in the same place. Two or three years ago six swallows were taken from their nests at Paris, and conveyed to Vienna, where a small roll of paper with a few words written on it was affixed to the wing of each; and they were let go one morning at a quarter past seven. Two arrived at Paris a little before one; one at a quarter past two; and one at four. The other two did not return at all, having perhaps met with some mishap. A falcon was taken from the Canaries to Andalusia and returned in sixteen hours, a distance of six hundred miles. Salmon are supposed to return in all cases to the river where they were bred. Crabs may be carried two or three miles out to sea, and they will find their way back to their old haunts. Mr. Jesse, in his Gleanings in Natural History, relates an extraordinary story of a tortoise which was captured at the Island of Ascension in the South Atlantic, and carried with several others to England. It had lost one fin, and was consequently named by the sailors the Lord Nelson. The voyage was very long, and most of the turtles died, and as the Lord Nelson seemed sickly when they drew near port, the sailors, in order "to give it a chance," threw it overboard in the English Channel, after it had been branded in the usual way, with certain letters and numbers burnt upon its under shell with a hot iron. Wonderful to relate, the same turtle was taken at the Island of Ascension two years afterward, having found its way three thousand five hundred miles through the watery waste to that little speck in the midst of the ocean. The unerring certainty with which bees fly in a straight line to their hives is proverbial, and bee-hunters discover the nests by catching two of the insects, carrying them to some distance apart, and letting them go. Each will at once take a straight line toward the nest, and by observing these lines and calculating where they ought to intersect, the honey is found. This instinct is the more remarkable as bees are very near-sighted, not being able, it is supposed, to see more than a yard before them. We have mentioned that savages have something of the same instinct, finding their way for long distances, not always by their acuteness of observation, but by an indescribable faculty which is like nothing so much as the instinct of birds. Mr. Jesse tells a story of a traveller in Australia, who lost his way in the interior, and was guided by one of the natives more than a hundred miles in a straight line to the place he wanted to reach. The savage, he was assured, could have led him almost as well blindfold, for he travelled as accurately when the sun was obscured as when it was visible, and was not assisted by marks on the barks of trees, or any of the other familiar landmarks of the wilderness. Our own frontiersmen have the same faculty to a greater or lesser degree. We ourselves, on two occasions, after a long day's hunt in the far West, in which we followed the game through so many twists and turns as to lose all idea of the points of the compass, were conducted by a trapper twelve or fifteen miles back to camp, on a perfectly dark night, across an utterly trackless prairie. There was neither tree, nor hill, nor footprint to mark the way, but our course was as straight as the bee flies. The trapper could not explain how he did it: it was by a species of instinct. The Newfoundland slut Jet, mentioned on a preceding page, once found her way to the writer's house, under circumstances which indicated the exercise of reason much more unmistakably than the instances just cited. The family were about moving from one house to another some two miles distant; but as the new dwelling was not ready for occupation when the lease of the old one expired, the furniture was stored in the neighborhood, and we all went away for a few weeks, leaving Jet behind. When we came to take possession of the new house, we found Jet there before us, although nothing belonging to us had yet been carried to the premises, and, so far as we knew, she had never been there in our company. Another dog belonging to us had been there, however, once or twice with one of the servants, and Jet perhaps had learned the secret from him. But it certainly showed great mental acuteness in the animal that she should not have followed the furniture, knowing apparently that it was only stowed away for a time, but, by putting this and that together, should have found out where her master meant to establish himself.
The power of putting this and that together is emphatically a reasoning faculty; in other words, it is the power of tracing the relation between cause and effect. The literature of natural history abounds in examples of the possession of this faculty by animals, and so does the experience of every one who has ever kept dogs or horses. Jet had it to an eminent degree. When she was about to bring forth a litter, she always tried to dig a cave for them under the steps of the front door. This, of course, was forbidden, but she was resolute, and many a time she had her cavern nearly finished before she was detected. The bell-wire passed under the steps, so that in the course of her digging she was very apt to ring the bell, and it was some time before the servants found out whence the mysterious ringing originated; but, when the secret was discovered, Jet was pulled out and punished. Punishment did not break her of the habit; indeed, she was an incorrigibly obstinate dog, and never was broken of any trick she once set her mind upon; but after that, whenever she heard the bell, she ran out of the hole and hid at the corner of the house until the coast was clear, when she would go back to work, taking more pains to avoid the wire. If her master was at home and suspected who rang the bell, he often answered the door himself, and looking toward the side of the house he was sure to see Jet peeping cautiously round the corner with such a mischievous and comical expression in her eyes that he rarely refrained from a hearty laugh; whereupon the dog would pluck up heart, and come forward, grinning and apologizing, as if to say, "I am very sorry I've given you so much trouble; I didn't know it was wrong, and I won't do so again." She was a dreadful liar, (for dogs can lie with their eyes and faces, as well as men can lie with their tongues.) but it was all very funny. Her understanding the use of a door-bell reminds us of a story told of an Italian greyhound at Bologna, which was accustomed every morning to visit a dog of its own species at a neighboring house. At first it used to wait in the street until the door was opened, but after a time it learned to use the knocker. Mr. Nassau Senior, in one of his articles in The Quarterly Review, gives an instance from his own knowledge of the way in which a terrier used to obtain admission to the common-room at Merton College, Oxford, whose sacred threshold, be it known, dogs are strictly forbidden to cross. "The animal's cunning," says Mr. Senior, "would have done honor to an Old Bailey attorney." We give the narrative in his own language: "It happened one evening that a couple of terriers had followed their masters to the door, and while they remained excluded, unhappily followed the habits rather of biped than of quadruped animals, and began to quarrel like a couple of Christians. The noise of the fight summoned their masters to separate them, and as it appeared that the hero of our tale had been much mauled by a superior adversary, the severe bienséances of the place were for once relaxed, and he was allowed to enjoy during the rest of the night the softness of a monastic rug and the blaze of a monastic fire, luxuries which every initiated dog and man will duly appreciate. The next day, soon after the common-room party had been assembled, the sounds of the preceding evening were renewed with tenfold violence. There was such snapping and tearing, and snarling and howling, as could be accounted for only by a general engagement:
'The noise alarmed the festive hall,
And started forth the fellows all.'
But, instead of a battle royal, they found at the door their former guest, in solitude sitting on his rump, and acting a furious dog-fight, in the hope of again gaining admittance among the quieti ordines deorum. We have heard that he was rewarded with both the grandes and the petites entrées; but this does not rest on the same authority as the rest of the narrative."
Mr. Watson's book abounds with other instances of intelligence in animals, which it is almost impossible to avoid attributing to the operation of reason. He gives an anecdote, for instance, of an elephant which, seeing an artillery-man fall from the tumbril of a gun, in such a situation that in a second or two the wheel of the gun carriage must have gone over him, instantly, without any warning from its keeper, lifted the wheel with its trunk and kept it suspended until the carriage had passed clear of the soldier. Here the elephant manifestly reasoned for himself. A still more remarkable manifestation of the reasoning faculty is recorded of an animal of the same species. An elephant in a menagerie was trained to pick up coins with his trunk. On one occasion a sixpence was thrown down which fell a little beyond his reach (he was chained) and near the wall. After several vain attempts to pick it up, he stood motionless a few seconds, evidently considering how to act; he then stretched his proboscis as far as he could in a straight line, a little distance above the coin, and blew with great force against the wall. The blast of air, rebounding from the wall, caught up the sixpence and drove it toward him, as he evidently intended it should. Another elephant was once seen to blow a potato which was just beyond his reach against the wall, and catch it when it rebounded. The ingenuity displayed in these cases is something akin to the use of tools which has been declared a characteristic of man alone. This, however, is a mistake. The club which the gorilla is known to wield with such terrible power, the palm-branches with which elephants brush away flies, the stones which monkeys and even birds have been seen to use either in breaking open shells or keeping them distended while they extracted the shell-fish—what are these but tools? Foxes have been seen to set cods' heads as baits for crows, and pounce upon the birds when they came to eat them. The ingenuity of rats in getting at toothsome morsels is well known; there are many instances of their using their tails to extract oil from narrow-necked bottles—all these cases being equivalent to the use of tools. A Newfoundland dog at Torquay, wanting water, took a pail from the kitchen and carried it to the pump, where he sat down until one of the men-servants came out, to whom he made such significant gestures that the man pumped the pail full for him. The most remarkable part of the story is that, when the dog had finished, he carried back the pail to the place in the kitchen from which he had taken it. That was something all the same as a tool which the eagle of St. Kilda, mentioned by Macgillivray, used when, attacking two boys who had robbed her nest, she dipped her pinions first in water and then in sand, to give greater force to the blows which she struck with them. A rat has been seen conducting a blind companion by means of a stick, each of the animals holding one end of it in his mouth. Cats have often been known to learn the use of a latch; and a terrier pup, only two months old, belonging to the writer of this article, has so good an idea of the purpose of the same article that he manifests a desire to get out of the room by ineffectual jumps at the door-handle. A London pastry-cook had a number of eggs stolen from a store room at the top of the house; a watch being set for the thief, two rats were detected carrying an egg downstairs. One of the rats, going down one step, would stand on his hind-legs with his fore paws resting on the stair above, while the other rolled the egg toward him; then, putting his fore-legs tightly round it, he lifted it down to the step on which he was standing, and held it there till the other came down to take charge of it. Rats have been known to convey eggs up-stairs by a somewhat similar process.
A very clear example of reasoning occurs in a story told of a water-hen, which, having observed a pheasant feed out of a box which opened when the bird stood on a rail in front of it, went and stood in the same place as soon as the pheasant quitted it. Finding that its weight was not sufficient to raise the lid of the box, it kept jumping on the rail to give additional impetus. This only succeeded partially; so the clever bird went away and fetched another of its own species, and the weight of the two had the desired effect. An anecdote is told by Mrs. Lee of a magpie which is almost enough to persuade one that the creature had the gift of language. The bird used to watch about a neighboring toll-gate at times when he expected the toll-keeper's wife to be making pastry; and, if he observed her so employed, he would perch upon the gate and shout, "Gate ahoy!" when, of course, if her husband were absent, she would run out to open it; the bird would then dart into the house and carry away a billful of her pie-crust, eating and chattering over it with the greatest glee. Surely no one will deny that in this case the bird exercised the faculty of reason.
Somewhat analogous to this case are the many stories related of animals apparently understanding what is said in their presence. In reality they probably have no conception of the meaning of the words uttered, but their keenness of observation enables them to detect slight changes in the tone of voice and notice little things which escape our coarser vision; and from trifling signs they draw reasonable conclusions. The writer had a cat which always knew when the servant was told to fetch food for her, though the experiment was often tried of giving the order in various tones of voice and without any look or sign that would be likely to attract pussy's attention. During our last war with England there was an old Newfoundland dog on board the British ship Leander, stationed at Halifax. He had been attached to the ship several years, and the sailors one and all believed that he understood what was said. He was lying on the deck one day when the captain in passing remarked: "I shall be sorry to do it, but I must have Neptune shot, he is getting so old and infirm." The dog immediately jumped overboard and swam to another ship, where being taken on board he remained till he died. Nothing could ever induce him to go near the Leander again, and if he happened to meet any of her boats or crew on shore, he made off as fast as he could.
Animals certainly have the power of communicating thoughts to each other, as the following story proves: "At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, (a village where Milton passed some of his early days,) about the year 1818, a gentleman from London took possession of a house, the former tenant of which had moved to a farm about half a mile off. The new inmate brought with him a large French poodle, to take the duty of watchman in the place of a fine Newfoundland dog which went away with his master; but a puppy of the same breed was left behind; and he was incessantly persecuted by the poodle. As the puppy grew up, the persecution still continued. At length he was one day missing for some hours; but he did not come back alone; he returned with his old friend, the large house-dog, to whom he had made a communication; and in an instant the two fell upon the unhappy poodle and killed him before he could be rescued from their fury. In this case the injuries of the young dog must have been made known to his friend, a plan of revenge concerted, and the determination formed to carry the plan into effect with equal promptitude." Count Tilesius, a Russian traveller, who wrote at the beginning of the present century, tells a wonderful anecdote of a dog of his which had been sadly worried by a larger and stronger animal. For some days it was observed that he saved half his food and laid it up as a private store. When he had accumulated a large supply, he went out and gathered around him several dogs of the neighborhood, whom he brought to his home and feasted on his hoard. The singular spectacle of a dog giving a supper-party attracted the count's attention, and he determined to watch their proceedings. As soon as the feast was over, they went out in a body, marched deliberately through the streets to the outskirts of the town, and there, under the leadership of their entertainer, fell upon a large dog and punished him severely. This incident not only shows that dogs can communicate their thoughts to one another, and can follow out a fixed plan of action, but it looks very much as if they had what is generally supposed to be peculiar to man—namely, some idea of a bargain. They can be magnanimous in their behavior toward their fellows, and the measures which large dogs occasionally adopt to get rid of the annoyance of little curs display a great deal of judgment and good feeling. In Mr. Youatt's book, On the Dog, we have a story of a Newfoundland dog in the city of Cork which had been greatly worried by a number of noisy curs. He took no notice of them until one carried his presumption so far as to bite him in the leg, whereupon the large animal ran after the offender, caught him by the back of the neck, and carried him to the quay. There, after holding him suspended over the edge for a few moments, he dropped him into the river. But he had no purpose to inflict more than a mild punishment, for after the cur had been well ducked and frightened and was beginning to struggle for his life, the Newfoundland dog plunged into the water and brought him safe to land. That animal certainly showed good sense, a good heart, and a lively appreciation of what was just and proper. A very comical example of a dog's feeling of propriety is quoted by Mr. Watson from Jesse's Gleanings in Natural History. "A gentleman going out shooting obtained the loan of a pointer from a friend, who told him that the dog would behave very well as long as he killed his birds: but that, if he frequently missed, it would leave him and run home. Unhappily the borrower was extremely unskilful. Bird after bird was put up and fired at, but flew off untouched, till the pointer grew careless. As if willing, however, to give his client one chance more, he made a dead stop at a fern bush, with big nose pointed downward, his forefoot bent, and his tail straight and steady. In this position he remained firm till the sportsman was close to him, with both barrels cocked; he then moved steadily forward for a few paces, and at last stood still near a bunch of heather, his tail expressing his anxiety by moving slowly backward and forward. At last out sprang a fine old black cock. Bang, bang, went both barrels, but the bird escaped unhurt. This was more than the dog could bear; he turned boldly round, placed his tail between his legs, gave one long, loud howl, and set off homeward as fast as he could."
Perhaps, after all, one of the most curious exhibitions of reason is afforded by the crows, which, in the northern parts of Scotland and in the Faroe Islands, hold extraordinary meetings every now and then, apparently for the purpose of judging and punishing evil-doers among their community. The sessions are sometimes prolonged two or three days; and as long as they last, flocks of crows continue to arrive in great numbers from all quarters of the heavens. In the mean while, some of the assembly are active and noisy; others sit with drooping heads as grave as judges. When the gathering is complete, a very general noise ensues—we are tempted to call it talking—and then the whole body fall upon one or two individuals and put them to death. Justice thus vindicated, the convention straightway disperses. Now, the crows show every appearance of having been summoned to these councils; indeed, it is almost inconceivable that they should meet by chance; but how the summons is given; how they know when all have arrived; what are the offences they punish; whether the criminals know the fate that awaits them, and are restrained by force from making their escape; and how the knowledge of the crime is dispersed amongst the whole assembly—these are curious questions to which we fear no satisfactory answer will ever be given. The idea of hundreds of birds sitting in deliberation, like a court of justice, is indeed marvellous. We can only say that the narrative, as we have given it, seems to be well authenticated, and we leave our readers to draw their own conclusions.
We think we have quoted anecdotes enough to prove that brutes have souls and reason; or, if they have not, that they are much more wonderfully made than man, since they can perform without assistance from the reasoning faculty actions which in us require the exercise of the highest intelligence. And although we do not go to the length of saying, with the Rabbi Manasseh of old, and Dr. John Brown, the author of Spare Hours, in our own day, that there is a next world for the brute creation; and do not believe with another modern writer (the Rev. J. G. Wood) that divine justice absolutely requires that God should make amends to animals in the future life for the sufferings they endure in this—perhaps our readers will agree with us that we have shown it to be no ways impossible that God may have designed the souls of dumb beasts to outlast in this world their perishable bodies; that the intelligent part of the sagacious dog may animate a long succession of Rabs and Pontos; and the spirit of the dead pet may return into bodily form to delight new generations of masters.
From The Month.
The Gladiators' Song.
Round about this grim arena, by the ghosts of thousands haunted,
Beckoned by our slaughtered comrades, move we on with hearts undaunted—
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant! Dark the world and always darker, none to comfort, none to love us,
Grisly hell beneath us yawning, deaf or dead the gods above us—
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant! Life and flesh and soul and sinew, beating heart and thought upsoaring—
Was the goblet of our being crowned but for this wild outpouring?
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant! Voices come through dreary silence, still for righteous vengeance calling—
So we chant our stern defiance false relentless Rome is falling!
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant! Countless years have tortured nations learned the truth of Roman mercies—
Ah! she falls in waste and carnage, 'mid the world's triumphant curses!
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant! Gleams of vengeance, long delaying, scantly sate the spirit's yearning—
Guessing, groping, craving, hoping, must we go without returning?
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant! Onward to our slaughtered comrades, round the arena, shadow-haunted,
On to endless night or morning pass we on with hearts undaunted!
Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant!
From Once a Week
Lakes of Lorraine.
On certain sultry and thunderous days in the middle of July, 1866, was celebrated, with fêtes and fireworks, illuminations by night, and brilliant shows by day, the first centenary of the union of the province of Lorraine to France. The scene was the city of Nancy, and splendor was added to the festival by the presence of the Empress Eugénie and the imperial prince, who lodged in the former palace of King Stanislaus of Poland, the last duke of Lorraine, and witnessed from its balcony the defiling of a long allegorical procession, representing in order the historical personages of the province, conspicuous among whom was the Maid of Orleans, personated by a youth of the town bearing in his hand a facsimile of her consecrated banner. The romance of the mediaeval spectacle was a little marred by certain laughable incongruities which the critical eye might detect; for instance, the arquebusiers of the sixteenth century were armed with percussion muskets; and the portly nymphs representing France and Lorraine seemed in consequence of the heat to be in somewhat too melting a mood for perfect dignity. The spectacle as a whole was, however, very imposing, and went off with a success peculiarly French, the clean and handsome city being crowded with well-behaved strangers from all the neighborhood, in such vast numbers that, in spite of their good behavior and good temper, they were fain to fight for their places in the trains, and one party had to wait till two A.M. at the station, after being in time to get away by ten at night. In bearing patiently such inconveniences in the pursuit of pleasure, our neighbors of the other side of the channel most undeniably surpass us. It was pleasant as a contrast to pass without let or hinderance the same station a few days later, following the line which runs parallel to the course of the Moselle past Épinal to Remiremont, on a visit to the lakes which lie in the country between that town and the terminus of St. Dié, which ends another branch of the Paris and Strasburg railway. Between Nancy and Épinal the stream of the Moselle is met winding through fertile meadows in a broad valley with low elevations on each side; near Épinal the scenery becomes more picturesque; there are more trees near the river, and the long level reaches are broken by occasional rapids with rocks about them. When Épinal is passed, the valley becomes narrower and prettier, shut in between two spurs of the Vosges, until the basin is reached, where Remiremont itself lies, and the waters of the Mosellote join those of the Moselle, each branch of the river from this point to the source having the character of a considerable mountain brook. The town of Remiremont itself resembles Freiburg in the Breisgau, minus its magnificent cathedral, in its size and general character, and especially in the abundance of fountains and runnels permeating the streets, which in their main portions are fronted with arcades like those of Bern or Bologna, a pleasant protection against sun and shower, and duly appreciated in the tempestuous summer of 1866.
The busy little town derives its euphonious name from one Saint Romary. In the circle of mountains enclosing the town one of conical shape is remarked, called Mont Habend, from Castrum Habendi, a camp erected on its site by the Romans.
In the seventh century this holy mountain was the chosen retreat of two anchorites, Amé and Romary, who founded there two monasteries, one for women, another for men, and were canonized after their deaths. The monasteries were destroyed by the Huns in the tenth century, but the site of one was repeopled again by monks a century later, while the nuns, abandoning the mountain, fixed themselves in the valley. The convent of Remiremont was governed during its long existence by sixty-four abbesses, the last of whom, Louise Adélaide de Bourbon Condé, died in 1824. It was a foundation even more exclusive and aristocratic in its character than All Souls', Oxford. The abbesses were generally princesses, and royal honors were accorded them. When each abbess entered the town for the first time, a great holiday was kept, and the mayor, instead of presenting the keys of the city, offered her the wine of the spot in a cup of gold, which she just touched with her lips before she passed within the walls to be enthroned with great state in the palatial apartments prepared for her. One of the number of these religious princesses, Catherine de Lorraine, distinguished herself in 1637 beating off from the walls of Remiremont the great Turenne, who was endeavoring to take the town from the Duke of Lorraine.
The town is now famous chiefly for the production of some excellent cakes with the quaint name of "quiches" probably only a corruption of the German Küchlein.
To the guests at the baths of Plombières, the lake region which lies between Remiremont and St. Dié is better known than to the general world, as it lies out of the way of tourists' thoroughfares; but though it cannot quite compete in beauty with the English or Scotch lakes, or Killarney, it is well worth a visit to those who are not obliged to go a great distance to see it. Instead of going due east to the source of the Moselle and the pass over the main chain of the Vosges which leads to Wesserling, and thence by rail to Basel, the road to Gérardmer turns to the left along a valley parallel to the line of the mountains, and flanked by lower hills, well wooded, on its other side. The foregrounds have the usual broken and diversified character of a granitic country, and the height of the hills is sufficient to make the distant views in many parts highly pleasing. There is enough picturesque incident to beguile very pleasantly the eighteen miles or so which the diligence traverses to Gérardmer. The name, derived from Gérard, a duke of Lorraine, has been given to a fine oblong sheet of clear water, about two miles long, and half a mile broad, bounded for the greatest part of its circumstance by long slopes covered with meadows and white cottages at intervals, but on the east by a pine forest and rocks, which give a more savage aspect to its further banks. From the Swiss villas built on its banks, the numerous pleasure-boats, and the general lively aspect, it brings to mind the lake of Zurich in miniature. At its further end is an immensely long village, also called Gérardmer, the most distinguishing mark of which is an enormous wych elm of unknown antiquity, standing in the market place.
In the summer, Gérardmer is full of visitors, who are well entertained at the Hôtel de la Poste and the Hôtel des Vosges at a moderate rate. The latter of these is conducted by an indefatigable little landlady, who is full of civilities, assisted by a good-natured, gigantic husband, who seems to superintend the kitchen department, and generally was seen during our visit lounging somewhere about the entrance, conspicuous in white trousers and a shirt of violet flannel, trimmed with scarlet. The wide road beyond Gérardmer branches to the right and left. The left branch leads into a valley choked with a primaeval pine forest, in the depths of which roars the torrent of the Vologne. The trees are of immense size, and completely clad with pendants of moss and lichen, telling of a considerable elevation of site, and of such weird and grand forms as to make one wish that the art of forest culture which fells the trees at a premature age had never been introduced. In one spot, not far from the so-called "Basse des Ours," or Bear Bottom, where the huge granite-blocks that have fallen from the crest of a mountain have been huddled together, a natural ice-house has been formed in the interstices, called "La glacière," and the fact of our finding no ice in it was accounted for by the summer not having been sufficiently hot to produce the necessary amount of evaporation. The road to the right passes over the torrent, by a bridge, and then divides again, its right branch leading over the mountains into the valley of Münster in Alsace, and its left to St. Dié. On the road to St. Dié two pines are seen which have grown together like Siamese twins.
Near the bridge is a cascade of singular beauty, which, from a peculiarity it possesses in changing its entire aspect as the spectator changes his ground, is called the Cascade des Fées. Not far from this cascade is a large slab of granite, and a fountain where Charlemagne is said to have dined when he passed out of Alsace over the Vosges into Lorraine, at a time when all the country was wild forest. A rough bridle road to the right leaves the main road to the Schlucht pass and the valley of Münster, and, making for a gap in the hill, soon discloses the beautiful piece of water called Longemer, or "The Long Lake," the Ullswater, as Gérardmer is the Windermere of Lorraine. It runs in a long trough between beautifully wooded steeps for about two miles, with a slightly serpentine direction, prettily broken by spits of grassy land with a few low trees upon them. At the upper end is seen, above woody heights, the bald summit of the Honeck, (Hoheneck, "The High Corner",) an eminence about four thousand feet high. At the lower end, shaded by lofty trees, is a little chapel on a tongue of land, dedicated to St. Bartholomew by an anchorite named Bilon, and near it a solitary villa belonging to a medical gentleman of the neighborhood, who spends his summer holidays in this Arcadian seclusion, boating and fishing in the lake and the clear stream that runs out of it. By a path to the right, following the sinuosities of the lake, a rocky barrier is reached, down whose face tumbles, among rocks and trees, a lovely waterfall; and when this is passed, another lake is disclosed, a round, low-lying basin, among dense woods and frowning escarpments, one of them called the Rock of the Devil, which bears the name of Retournemer, or "The Lake of Return." A solitary dwelling, backed by fine beeches and other trees, stands on the brink, the cottage of the forester, where the wanderer to this end of the world finds hospitable entertainment. But notwithstanding the impassable look of the scenery round, a zig-zag path through the trees climbs the height behind the house, and joins the road which leads to the Col de la Schlucht, where a beautiful view opens into Alsace, its most prominent objects being that long spur of the Vosges which terminates by Colmar, and on the other side a broken granite wall, crowned by a peculiarly imposing cap of rock, under which the road descends to the green slopes about Münster, which are variegated with acres of bleaching linen, the product of the weaving industry which pervades the whole country. On the Col itself is a spacious chalet or hotel, with excellent accommodation and abundant fare, to which appetites whetted by the bracing mountain air are inclined to do full justice. From this point, by walking up a long slope in a southerly direction, the top of the Honeck is reached, grazed over by herds of cattle tinkling with Alpine bells, and commanding a spacious view over the valley of the Rhine to the distant Black Forest, with tremendous precipices in the foreground on the side of Alsace. Instead of returning from this point direct to Gérardmer, I walked through a forest of apparently blasted horn-beam, as grisly as the trees in Gustave Doré's drawings, into a long valley, which led in course of time to a busy place called La Bresse, and thence, turning to the right, over a moderately high pass back to Gérardmer. Besides the three lakes already mentioned, there is Blanchemer, or the "White Lake," in the valley of the Mosellote; the Lac de Corbeaux, so-called from an overhanging cliff frequented by ravens; the Lac de Lispach, rich in fish, divided by a ridge from Longemer, and the Lac de Marchet, on the flank of a mountain not far from Bresse. The so-called White, Black, and Green lakes belonging to Alsace are situated further to the north on that side of the Vosges chain which looks toward the Rhine. On one of the mounds of the Honeck mountain there is an abundant and perennial spring, called La Fontaine de la Duchesse, which perhaps possesses a higher claim to be the source of the Moselle than the more trifling stream which descends by Bussang, though the latter pours its contribution in a more direct line. The sources of rivers, whether small or great, are generally controvertible. Some consider the Inn, which rises in the Grisons, as having more claim to be the real Danube than the river which rises at Donaueschingen, and, between the rival claims of the Victoria Nyanza of Speke and the Albert Nyanza of Baker, the real head of mighty Nilus himself still remains an open question for geographers.
Original.
Columbus
Three Scenes.
'Tis midnight; through the lozenge panes
Flashes a southern storm;
And the lightning flings its livid stains
O'er a bowed and wearied form.
He stands, like a ship once staunch and stout
By billows too long opprest;
And a fiercer storm than whirls without
Tears through his heaving breast.
His hand is pressed on his aching brow,
And veils his eyes' dark light,
And a twinkling cresset's dim red glow,
When the lightning pales, doth sadly flow
O'er locks where many a thread of snow
Tells of time's troubled flight.
He stands—a fading, a clouded star,
Half-hid in the rack of heaven's war;
Or, like a vanquished warrior, one
Whose heart is crushed, whose hopes are gone
After many a gallant fight.
He turns and he paces the damp stone floor,
And his glance seeks the damper wall,
Where the charts, o'er which he had loved to pore,
Like arras rise and fall.
There is his heart's most cherished store,
There lie the fruits of his deepest lore,
And his lips, as he views them o'er and o'er,
His withered life recall:
"And was it all a dream?
Is this the bitter waking?
And is hope's heavenly beam
For aye my soul forsaking?
I thought to see the cross unfurled
Upon the hills of a far-off world!
To bear the faith of the Crucified
Far o'er the wild Atlantic's tide!
To see adored the Christian's God
Where Christian foot hath never trod!
Sure brighter dreams from heaven ne'er fell
And I wake in this cold, dim cell!
"And were they, too, but dreams——
Those lands far in the West,
Where robed in sunset beams
The Seven Cities rest?
Far, far beyond the blue Azores,
I thought to press the ocean's shores;
The heaving, restless main to span,
And give—and give—a world to man!
A new-born world of vernal skies
Fresh with the breath of paradise—
A world that yet would place my name
The foremost on the scroll of fame.
And now I wake, poor, friendless, lone,
'Mid these dripping walls of stone.
"And was it but a dream
I left fair Italy?
To chase the churchyard gleam
Of false expectancy—
That light which, like the swamp's pale glare,
Lures but to darkness and despair?
To crush the visions youth built up?
Drink to its poisoned dregs the cup
Of hope deferred and trust misplaced?
To feel heart shrink and body waste?
And still like drowning wretch to cry,
'One more effort and I die!'"
II.
The drear, chill gray of dawning day
Dies in a golden glow,
And merrily on the dancing sea
The rippling sunbeams flow;
And they glance and glint, in many a tint,
Over minaret and tower,
Where the lofty cross shows the Paynim's loss
And the wane of Moslem power.
And waving high in the brightening sky,
Floating o'er town and sea,
And gleaming bright in the morning light,
Spain's flag flaunts haughtily.
Who passes through the antique street
Worshipped by all around?
Whom do the thousand voices greet
That to the heavens resound?
Proud is the flash of his dark eye,
Yet tempered with humility;
The softened radiance, high yet meek,
That doth the Christian soul bespeak;
Proud is his heaving bosom's swell,
And proud his seat in velvet selle;
His very courser paws the earth
As conscious of its master's worth.
And now his armed heel loud rings
Through a high, carved hall,
Where blazoned shields of queens and kings
Hang fluttering on the wall.
Around, the noblest of the land
In deepest awe uncovered stand:
Princes, whose proud sires had well
Upheld the cross with Charles Martel;
And knights, whose scutcheons flashed amid
The fiercest fights where blazed the Cid;
Soldiers, who by their sovereign's side
Hurled back in blood the seething tide
Of Moslem war; and churchmen sage,
The men who smoothed that iron age.
And all alone, 'mid that bright throng,
His voice arises clear and strong.
He stands before a throne; even now
His dark plume waves above his brow,
As he, of all the courtier train,
Rivalled the majesty of Spain.
Fortune like this, what fate can mar?
He stands—a cloudless, risen star.
III.
Once more 'tis the mid hour of night;
Once more the storm beats high;
But now it whirls its fearful might
Along the cloud-fraught sky
Which spans the drear Atlantic's waste,
All whitened with wild foam,
That cleaves the air, as sea-birds haste
At even to their home.
But even there, where nature's power
Laughs puny man to scorn,
Man lords it for his little hour
O'er fellow-man forlorn.
Within a Vessel's creaking sides
A chained prisoner sits;
Drooped, weary, careless what betides
His tired soul, ere it flits
Far from a world where gratitude
Yields ever to the selfish brood
That gold and thirst for honor bring
To breast of peasant and of king.
What now avails the world he gave
To thankless Spain? It cannot save
From slavish chains its whilom lord,
Nor shield him from the hatred poured
O'er his bowed head by those who late
But formed the puppets of his state.
Gone is his kindly mistress—laid
To sleep among Spain's royal dead.
Dead is her smile, her beaming gaze
So full of hope when darkening days
Hung o'er the crown she wore so well;
Yea, dead is queenly Isabel!
And where are now the crowds that hung
Upon his steps when every tongue
Shouted his praise? The station high
Above all Spain's plumed chivalry?
The high commands? Away! each thought
With saddening memory so deep fraught!
Call not pale flashes from afar
To mock with light a fallen star!
The past is dead, the future read,
Ay! see a broken, moss-grown stone,
And on it view a kingly meed
Of thanks to genius shown—
Ay! trace o'er that forgotten grave—
"ANOTHER WORLD COLUMBUS GAVE
TO CASTILE AND LÉON."
Front-de-boeuf.
Original.
The Two Lovers of Flavia Domitilla.
by Clonfert.
Chapter II.
The Slaves' Feast.
The great Festival called Saturnalia was being celebrated in Rome when these events took place. The occurrence of this feast enabled the Christians from many parts of the world to assemble in the city, and to celebrate under cover of it the feast of Christmas. History does not light us with certainty to the precise time at which this latter feast was instituted, but shows it in matured existence at a very early period. Tradition has surmised that it had its birth in the first century, and that it was celebrated in secret and security under shadow of the pagan festivities of the Saturnalia.
The Saturnalia, in honor of Saturnus, to whom the Latins traced the introduction into Italy of agriculture and the civilizing arts, fell toward the end of December. The agricultural labors of the year being then over, it became a kind of harvest-home with the rural population. After the Julian addition of two days to the month of December, it commenced on the 16th of the Kalends of January, that is, on the 17th December, and continued for three days. But the people generally anticipated the time and prolonged it to the end of the month, especially to the 24th, when it became merged in another feast called Sigillaria, on account of the earthenware figures then hawked about as toys for children.
During the feast the slaves were allowed great liberty of act and of speech. Throwing off their sombre garments of brown and black, which, together with their slippers, made up the servile dress, (vestis servilis,) they donned their masters' clothes, assumed like freedmen the pileus, or felten cap, considered the badge of freedom. Their allowance of bread and salt and oil was increased and made palatable by the addition of wine. Their masters often waited on them at table, where thoughts were freely uttered in joke and song as well as in sober earnest without restraint or blame. The whole people made merry; the toga was laid aside, and the loose-fitting garment synthesis put on with a high-peaked skull-cap without brim, (pileus.) Wax-tapers were given as presents, particularly by slaves to their owners and by the clients to their patrons; with these lighted in their hands, they went along the streets shouting "Io Saturnalia!" Stores and courts were closed; schools kept holiday; war could not be proclaimed; evil-doers could not be punished; gambling, prevented by law at other times, was permitted. In private circles mock-kings were chosen, who ruled the sports with right royal dignity. All these and greater privileges, were granted the slaves.
Aurelian was in no mood for enjoyment since his interview with Flavia. Knowing that many strangers would be calling at his Roman palace, he avoided them by betaking himself to his suburban villa. There, too, he could with less fear of discovery keep his engagements with Zoilus and Sisinnius for the 8th of the Kalends of January. He was nervously anxious to prove the truth of what the former had told him.
He retired, therefore, to the country. Thither he invited Sisinnius to meet him on the day agreed on with Zoilus, under plea of seeing his slaves celebrate the feast in rural style. Sisinnius found him in the Tablinum, a room opposite the hall door, where family records and archives were kept. Seeing Aurelian, thin, pale, and dull, writing on a parchment roll, he asked:
"Is it making your will you are? You remind me of the shade of Dido! This comes of neglecting the gods and their feasts, and shutting yourself up among those woods and stone-walls like a vestal. If you staid in the city, and lighted your wax-taper, and sang your song to Saturn like a good jolly fellow, you would be far more cheerful and comely!"
"Perhaps so. But the three destinies are not all and always kind. I have had my happy times; it is fair my sad ones should come."
"Pshaw, Aurelian! Pour out a libation to Bacchus and then empty off the goblet yourself, and you shall find the jolly god will stiffen up your drooping spirits! I know the cause of all this—your interview with that wilful girl! Cheer up! women are like the summer clouds, one time damp and dark, the next beaming with the sunshine of love and beauty."
"Very poetical, Sisinnius, but Flavia is not after the ordinary mould. Tonight, however, will decide my doubts and hopes for ever. You remember our engagement with Zoilus?"
"Yes, I am half sorry I made it. I cannot read that slave. He seems to know every one and everything; and one can scarcely distinguish between his jocose and his serious moods. Do you know where I met him as I came to the crossway of the Appian and Latin roads? Talking to that Jewish beggar who sits morning, noon, and night asking pennies from the passers-by near the Egerian fountain."
"I allowed him into the city to arrange for our admission to the meeting-place of the Christians. He certainly does know a great deal, and must be a clever deceiver. Otherwise he could not have crept into the secrets of those mysterious, plotting Jewish sects without being distrusted. However, in the present instance he is serious and to be trusted; for I have promised him and a female slave—a Jewess also, who has fascinated him—their liberty, in case he convinces me that Flavia has become a Christian. But, hush! here he comes. Well, Zoilus, you have returned sooner than I expected. What news from the city?"
"Hail, noble Sisinnius!" said the Greek, bowing. "Well, master, the divine Domitian is in a fury; the exhibition of games in the new amphitheatre has been a failure. He had ordered, it is said, nearly ten thousand beasts and a proportionate number of gladiators, a number exceeding that with which his brother Titus had dedicated it. The play of Hercules and Omphale was to be enacted before the people. A gladiator was under training for many weeks to sustain the character of Hercules, and was to have been burned alive at the end in a skirt set on fire with vitriol and tar. The gladiator went through the preparatory training well, and seemed to enjoy the good things ordered him by the emperor with the view of making him fleshier and fatter for the burning. But, while being brought to the amphitheatre this morning, he slipped his head between the spokes of the cart-wheel, and, without gratitude for the good things, or feeling for the disappointment of the imperial god, suffered his neck to broken. This was really too bad of mere slave! [Footnote 166]
[Footnote 166: An historical fact. Friedlander.]
"So another had to substituted; what comfort or cause of laughter would there be in witnessing the burning of the corpse? A live substitute was found, who most ungraciously refused to move either hand or foot in the love-making of Hercules and Omphale. However, this could be borne in anticipation of the fiery ending; but, wonderful to relate, when the skirt was put on and the flames were lighted, he stood unscorched in their midst, calling on the Christian God. Was not the emperor in a rage! The water was let into the arena and the crocodiles and other amphibious monsters were swimming about, devouring each other; and the man was thrown in, but they would not touch him! Floating on the surface of the water, with upturned face and clasped hands, he prayed the Christian God to have pity on Domitian. This so angered the latter that, standing up from his seat above the arena, he cursed the Christian and the Christian's God, in the name of his own and of Jupiter's divinity. When, lo! as if Jupiter was provoked, a thunderbolt like a burning globe came flashing as if from highest heaven, and went hissing through the water in the arena, killing every living thing within it except the floating Christian! The veil of the amphitheatre, with the machinery by which it was sustained, was set on fire and torn away. The people rushed from their seats; it is not known how many lives were lost. The emperor himself was terrified, and, running from his throne to his chariot, drove furiously to his palace, to find it also struck by the lightning." [Footnote 167]
[Footnote 167: These facts are substantially true. Tillemont's Lives of the Emperors, and the History of the Flavian Amphitheatre, or Colosseum, relate things as wonderful of Domitian's reign.]
"This will hasten the edict of persecution against the Christians; and it is time," observed Aurelian.
The villa stood on a farm of many hundred acres. A wooded hill, from which it was separated by a stream emptying into the Tiber, sheltered it from the wintry winds. The stream drained the land, which otherwise would have been a marsh, and thus prevented the unhealthy effluvia which unfitted many parts near the city for human resilience. Its distance of some miles from the great southern road saved it from many visitors, and thereby rendered it a secure retreat for a mind seeking solitude. Attached to the villa, but at some hundred yards from it, were the dwelling-places of the outdoor slaves, in and around which they were now feasting. It consisted of two open courts, [Footnote 168] an outer and an inner one.
[Footnote 168: Cohortes, chortes, cortes—courts.]
In the buildings around the former was the kitchen, an apartment large enough to contain the whole family employed on the farm. Family (familia) was the word used to designate the total number of slaves employed on an estate or in a household. Near the kitchen were the baths, the oil and wine-presses, the cellars, and in the upper stories the granaries, carefully protected from damp, heat, and insects. At the entrance-gate of this court were the apartments for the Villicus, or chief steward, and for the Procurator of the family. In the inner court were the stables, stalls, and sheds, (equilia, bubilia, and ovilia.) In the centre of each court was a large reservoir, into which the water from the stream was carried through terra-cotta pipes, or Roman-arched drains. The reservoir in the outer court was generally used for cleansing and soaking vegetables; that in the inner was carefully supplied with fresh water for poultry and cattle. Around both courts were the chambers (cellae) of the slaves, which fronted southward so as to catch the sun's light and heat. Near these chambers, but partly underground, was the prison for refractory or fugitive slaves; it was partially lighted by long and narrow windows.
Aurelian and Sisinnius strolled leisurely from the villa, accompanied by Zoilus, and discussing the wonderful events he had related. When they reached the courts, they found the slaves engaged in different amusements. It was a bright, bracing day; the sun shone in a cloudless sky, which had been swept by the wind. There was nothing to remind them of December, save only the long, dry branches of the trees rustling and swaying on the hillside, and the gusts sweeping at times in eddies round the courts as if they had lost their way. Some of the slaves were playing at quoits; others at draughts (latrunculi) in sheltered nooks. Some indulged in the usually forbidden game of dice, while younger ones took a boyish pleasure in rattling the cylindrical dice-boxes of bone or ivory, (fritillus.) A group in the central area of the outer court played at odd and even, (par impar ludere;) while another was gathered around a slave with long-flowing philosophic beard, who proposed puzzles on the abacus, or calculating tray. Many sat quietly apart; others walked moodily about, wrapped in thoughts that seemed tinged with disappointment and gloom. But the great body of the family was in the kitchen, which resounded with singing, music, and dancing. As soon as Aurelian and his companions had entered the last-named apartment, a little slave with hunchback, wiry frame bounded from a couch and seized the skirt of his master's toga, which was slung in walking style over the left shoulder.
"The gods will be angry with the senator for wearing his toga during the feast, and for not waiting on Caipor as he did last year," exclaimed the dwarf.
"No, no, Caipor! Saturnus has given me leave to retain the toga; because I am not well, and he fears I would catch cold if I laid it aside for a lighter dress."
The face of Caipor darkened and tears brightened through his eyelashes.
"Poor master is not well and shall die! Then what will Caipor do? Villicus will whip him and put him in the furca for ringing his bells; or they will sell him and he will never more see or love good master or beautiful Flavia."
Aurelian assured him that there was no danger of his own death, and that he might ring his bells and should not be whipped. The little fellow shook his Phrygian cap, and rang a tiny peal from the tiny bells attached around it. The jingle caused him to laugh out with idiotic delight.
"Villicus cannot whip Caipor for shaking his bells, ha, ha! Villicus whipped Lucius to-day until the big drops of blood came from between the shoulders, and put him on the mill in the prison."
"Impossible!" said Sisinnius. "It is not lawful to punish or imprison during the feast."
"Lucius said so. But Villicus would not listen. Lucius is a big, strong man —why did he not kill Villicus? He did not cry or stir, but he kept calling on Jesus to help him; but Jesus did not come. Master, who is Jesus?" asked the fool.
Aurelian's curiosity was aroused. On questioning the steward, he was told that Lucius, with many other slaves, refused to join in honoring Saturn or any of the gods, or to award divinity to the emperor; that it was necessary to punish some one for example's sake, and that Lucius, other wise quiet and inoffensive, was chosen as being principal among the recusants.
"What is to come next?" said Aurelian bitterly to Sisinnius. "Our wives and daughters, and now our lowest slaves, are lured by this Christian seducer! Like the pestilence from the marshes, his influence is creeping into every corner and poisoning the whole atmosphere of our social system. Something must be done to check its deadly progress. A stronger dose than that administered by Nero is requisite to kill it."
Caipor was clinging affectionately to his master's side. At length, drawing the toga by a sudden jerk, he looked up into Aurelian's face and said:
"Caipor waits upon the senator the year round. Will not the senate wait upon Caipor during the festival?"
"Certainly, I will be your slave and wait on you, my Caipor! Where is your couch?"
Couches with, small tables for the guests had been arranged in form of a triclinium at one end of the large apartment. Leading Aurelian to one of these seats, the hunchback fool reclined upon his elbow in [a] most approved dining attitude; and, as Aurelian rolled the table to his side and helped him to wine and fruit, looked around the room with mingled pride and pleasure at being the only one so honored.
Meantime Zoilus told Sisinnius the history and character of several slaves. There were about four hundred present. Our readers may give us credit for exaggeration if we draw attention to the vast numbers, the varied origin, and occupations of slaves owned by noble Romans in the age of Domitian. Slavery arose from three causes, namely, from birth, from civil punishment, and captivity in war. The captives by war alone would swell the number enormously. In the reign of Augustus a freedman died leaving by will over four thousand slaves, after having lost other thousands in the civil wars. Historians say that many Romans had from ten to twenty thousand. Juvenal puts the test of a person's fortune in the question, "Quot pascit servos?" "How many slaves does he support?" During the empire they filled every position, from the most menial to the most literary. They were tillers and caretakers of the territories of the patricians in Italy, Sicily, and in the provinces beyond the mountains and the seas. They were employed as bakers, barbers, cooks, stewards, and artisans; as tutors, clerks, amanuenses, readers, teachers, physicians, astronomers, rhetoricians, poets, and philosophers. The literature and science of the Roman world, the "Orbis terrarum" found many a worthy representative in their ranks. Hence it has been well said that the martial prowess of Rome conquered that of foreign nations, but that the civilization and learning of foreigners conquered or rather produced hers.
We need not wonder, therefore to find hundreds of slaves in the household of Aurelian. His family was among the oldest and noblest of the city. Counting those on his Italian and foreign estates, they numbered many thousands. In the assemblage which Sisinnius was scanning, many nationalities had representatives—Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Britons, Greeks, and Jews.
"Whence was Caipor purchased?" asked Sisinnius.
"The mother of Aurelian," answered Zoilus, "was driving in her four-wheeled chariot (rheda) through the streets of Rome. Her attention was drawn to a dwarfish figure, who, emerging from the forum of Augustus, followed the chariot-wheels, clapping his hands and crying out, 'Well done! little wheel. Run fast! Big wheel can't catch you; well done, little wheel!' He was in ecstasies on seeing the smaller wheels of the carriage, as it rolled quickly on, keep their position at the same distance from the larger. The slave-dealer from whom he had wandered came up and scourged him severely. He cried piteously and called on the lady for protection. Moved with pity, she made her husband buy him at a cost of ten thousand sestertia, ($50,000.) [Footnote 169] Since that time he has been the pet fool of the household (morio,) and was, according to custom, named Caipor (Caii puer) after my noble master's father."
[Footnote 169: A morio, or fool, in the reign of Nero cost $15,000! Dio.]
"What is the name of that female yonder? How beautiful is the symmetry of her face and figure! But there is determined purpose in her lip and eye."
"That is Judith the Jewess," said Zoilus, slightly confused. "She was bought like myself from among the slaves left by the late Consul Domitilla. She was a little girl during the siege of Jerusalem; and, having miraculously escaped was, like other girls of her age and beauty, brought to grace the triumphal return of the conqueror Titus. During the procession she was perched like a winged Iris on the same chariot with Venus and Apollo."
"And that other near her?"
"Is the daughter of a Roman plebeian, and by birth a free woman. But, having secretly married a slave, she was on discovery reduced to his level. She bears her lot patiently, however, because she cannot be separated by sale from her husband."
"I see two strongly built slaves sitting near each other. One of them wears his beard; and the fair locks of the other are down to his shoulders. They seem to look contemptuously on the amusements."
"One of these is a Getulian, the other a Briton. They were both chiefs and warriors in their respective countries. You perceive the mark (stigma) burned into the former's forehead? When first exposed in the slave-market, having on his neck the tablet (titulus) describing his various qualities, a physician was brought, before whom he was to be stripped and examined. Before they had time to so treat him he snatched up a staff, and, having prostrated slave dealer and physician, with a sweep bounded over the railing of the area and escaped among the buildings of the old forum. It cost the lives of three slave-hunters before he was captured. He was branded as a dangerous character and condemned to die as a gladiator. But Aurelian succeeded in procuring him. Since he came on this estate he has made no attempt at escape. Being allowed a percentage (peculium) on his work like many others employed by our master, he has become industrious, and hopes after some years to be able to purchase his liberty by his savings. The Briton is similarly situated. If they succeed in procuring freedom, depend upon it, they will return to their native hills and relight the torch of war."
"Who is that old man with bald head and long white beard, to whom Aurelian is now speaking?"
"That is Bathus, the tutor and caretaker of Aurelian's youthhood. He wears the long beard and cloak of a philosopher by license of the festival. He hates the emperor on account of his late edict of expulsion against the philosophic tribe. He also professes grammar and rhetoric. Next [to] him is Tritonios, a disciple of Hippocrates. He is famous for his skill in bleeding and in amulets. His bored ears show his Eastern origin, probably in Arabia. You may find him any morning before sunrise gathering herbs for charms. There is scarcely a slave, or a tree on the estate that has not a triangular Abracadabra, or some other amulet suspended on him or it, as a protection against disease and the evil genii."
While Zoilus and Sisinnius were thus conversing, those in the other parts of the apartment were not without their own topics and amusements. It was observable that they instinctively took their places according to their position and rank in the family. Those born in the household, the vernae, were more forward and talkative than the others; they well deserved the character given of them by the poet as the "vernae procaces."
A Roman slave-family contained all the sources of social enjoyment and happiness, such as was possible for persons in their condition, provided the owner and the superintendents were not inclined to tyranny. Their marriage was not indeed sanctioned by law; but the contubernium, which permitted them to live as man and wife under the same roof, was respected in its relations as much perhaps among the pagan, as among Christian nations, among whom slavery flourished. [Footnote 170]
[Footnote 170: Cod. iii. 23.]
An enactment was passed by the senate that in sales and divisions of property husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister, should not be sundered. Roman jurists, no doubt, defined slavery to be a "constitutio juris gentium, quâ quis contra naturam alterius dominis subjicitur," thus strictly giving the master power to do much as he liked with the slave; to sell, punish, and put to death. In consequence great cruelties were often inflicted. But generally social intercourse and positive morality softened down their severity. Positive legislation also came to the aid of the slave. Under the Antonines, a man putting his slave to death without a justifying cause was subject to a heavy penalty. If a slave were treated too harshly, he might bring the case before the public tribunal and claim to be sold to another master. If a sickly or aged slave were exposed by the owner, he became free; and, if put to death, the crime was punished as murder. Christianity, though it did not proclaim slavery to be an essential evil, made way for emancipation. The great principles of charity were urged by the first Christian writers and fathers of the church. Clement of Alexandria devoted much of his eloquence to this subject. Gradually this Christian spirit impregnated society, especially after the triumph of the cross under Constantine. Slaves who became priests, monks, nuns, or were promoted to any clerical order, were made free by law. Owing to these circumstances, the number of slaves became very much lessened. Many Christian masters emancipated all they possessed; others kept them, until they were instructed and converted, and then gave them freedom. Justinian particularly did much for the overthrow of slavery: his legislation, inspired by the Catholic Church, would have wholly extinguished it, but for the invasion of the northern barbarians. These brought with them their slaves, who were mostly Sclavonians, (sclavi, or slaves,) and reduced many of the conquered to the same level. The church was true to her policy of not suddenly tearing up any of the foundations of society when not essentially wrong; but she never ceased to preach, "in season and out of season," the great principle of "doing unto others as we would have them do unto us." This is the mirror she has always held up before master and slave. Seeing their duties here reflected, the evils of slavery, and finally the system itself, began to fade like snow under the softening influence of the sun. The voice of the Catholic Church was the herald of freedom from the beginning. Wondrous changes were brought about without those calamities accompanying sudden transitions. The echoes of her teaching have been taken up by religious and political parties. But they have had the injustice of appropriating it as their own, and the ingratitude to forget that the Catholic Church was the mother at whose knees mankind learned the lessons of Christian charity and liberty! But we must return.
During the conversation between Zoilus and Sisinnius, the jests and laughter of the "vernae" were heard above all other sounds.
"Observe Zoilus," said one, "he looks as sober and serious as Rhadamanthus on the judgment-seat. What is the matter with him?"
"He is expecting to be a freedman one of these days, and thinks it time to become a gentleman and quit his old habits and associates."
"Why, as to that matter, he is as free as the wind on the hill-side. He is in and out of the city as often as he likes. What induces master to give him so much freedom? There is something in it."
"See Murena, too! He expects in a few months to buy himself out with the profits of his peculium."
"That accounts for his being so great a miser. The barber told me that, after having his hair cut and nails pared the other day, Murena gathered the cuttings in order to make a denarius on them!"
This observation of the physician Tritonios caused laughter and was not unheard by Murena, who replied:
"O doctor! that is a stale joke stolen from Plautus. Next time I will preserve the parings for your amulets, they may be as good for the toothache or the colic as the hairs on the goat's chin which you hung upon the arm of Marcus!"
"Take care, Murena!" said a third, "you don't know how soon you may require Tritonios to assist you."
"Yes, and share the fate of Procax, who only saw the doctor in a dream, and awoke no more, though he carried an amulet."
The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of two slaves, a male and female, dressed in short and close garments for the dance. They wore leathern skull-caps for protection of the head in case of falling, because as they danced they flung themselves on their heads and alighted again upon their feet. Another slave played appropriate airs on the flute. After engaging in this dance, in which, after Spartan style, the hands and head and eyes were in motion as well as the feet, a rope was extended across the room. The female dancer ascended, carrying a thyrsus bound with white fillet and ending in a bunch of vine and ivy leaves mixed with berries. Balancing herself with this, she danced in many graceful attitudes, representing satyrs, fauns, bacchanals, and other mythological beings. Then exchanging the thyrsus for a crater of wine and a small drinking-cup, she danced and meantime poured the wine from one vessel into the other, balancing herself by the action, and then descended amid great applause. After the dance the amanuensis of Aurelian declaimed with great spirit the beautiful passage of Homer in which the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles is described. Here some one remarked that Zoilus had not sung or improvised during the evening, and a unanimous call was made on turn, with which, after some hesitation, he complied by singing the following:
The Song of Saturnus.
A hymn to Saturnus, a grateful hymn,
With goblets festooned to the bead-crowned brim,
On his festival we sing:
Who once in the year
Doth freedom and cheer
To slave and to master bring,
Bring,
To slave and to master bring.
He taught unto men how to till the hard soil,
To plant the green grape and to draw the fat oil
Which flows in the olive's heart,
To prune the vine
And to tap the mine,
And every useful art.
He breathed on the earth; and his breath is the spring
Which flowers and fruits on its bosom doth fling,
And sweetens the summer breeze
As it freshly blows
Where the water flows
Through the roots of the leaf-clad trees.
He breathed on the sea; and the ripples came
Like smiles o'er its face, and its amorous frame
Kissed with its cooling lip
The shore in the hours
When the sky sends its showers
For the thirsty earth to sip.
He breathed on the air; and its brow grew white
With rays scarce concealed by the veil of night;
And the sun from its blue looked down
With a smile so bland
As to free the land
From the chill of his winter frown.
He breathed on the springs; and the streams rushed out
From their mother's lap with a mirthful shout:
"Oh! come to the fields," they sang,
"For the parched meads
Need our limpid beads,"
And they laughed as they onward sprang.
Then a hymn to Saturnus, a grateful hymn,
With goblets festooned to the wine-crowned brim,
On his festival we sing:
Who once in the year
Doth freedom and cheer
To slave and to master bring!
"Why, Zoilus, you rival Martial the Spaniard in wooing the virgin Nine," said Bathus. "If the emperor only knew your powers, he would patronize you as well as Juvenal, Quinctilian, and the Jew Josephus."
"The renegade from his race and creed!" said Ephrem, a Jewish slave, in an underbreath to Judith, who sat beside him.
"The golden age of poesy, like that of philosophy, has departed," remarked Zoilus in answer to Bathus. "The emperor has lost his early love of verse-making, and betaken himself to the burning of vestals [Footnote 171] and of Christians.
[Footnote 171: Vestals were burned in the reign of Domitian for violation of their vows.]
"By the way, Bathus, have you heard that Epictetus and the whole host of philosophers have been exiled? They say that Dio Chrysostom is consoling himself in the Getulian desert with a tract of Plato and a speech of Demosthenes. I would advise you strongly to shave your beard and lay aside the philosopher's cloak, or the beard may be cut off with the head attached to it. Genius is at a low ebb nowadays; that is my reason for having ceased to be one."
"Beware, lest you might share a like fate; your tongue wags very freely," observed Aurelian, who overheard the conversation.
"Noble master, this is the feast of free speech. To-morrow I will padlock my lips, and nothing but a golden key will open them." said the slave, glancing knowingly at his master. Then turning to Ephrem the Jew, "Sing us that ode to your native land I heard you repeat the other day, Ephrem."
"It is in Hebrew, and would not be understood."
"No matter; the metre and air are sweet and melancholy. I will have it translated into Latin hexameter by your countryman Josephus, one of these days, if you like."
"Name him not, the arch-sycophant, who lives by flattering tyrants," whispered Judith with a fierce tone and glance, before which Zoilus blanched and trembled.
"Fair Judith, be not angry; I meant it only in joke."
"Jokes at the expense of others' feelings deserve not the award of wit," said Ephrem, who, standing up, declaimed the following with a vehement earnestness:
Ode of the Exiled Jew to Jerusalem.
I.
Thy heart, Jerusalem! is desert and drear,
Thy children no more in thy bosom appear;
In the land of the Gentiles they sigh and they moan,
While thou, dear mother! dost pine all alone.
II.
Thy turrets, and temple, and beautiful gate—
The gems that shone bright in the crown of thy state—
Like the ark of the prophets, no longer remain,
And the Philistine foxes thy beauty profane!
III.
The gold harp of David awakens no more
Thy echoes where pontiff and people adore;
Thy silver-voiced trumpets are silent and dead,
No smoke from thy temple ascends overhead.
IV.
Like the weeds on the beach by the ocean-tide hurled,
Thy daughters are cast on the shores of the world;
Thy eye's filled with weeping, thy heart's filled with woe,
And thy brow once so fair in the dust is laid low!
V.
The dust of thy kings in thy bosom remains
Where the hoofs of the Gentiles insult thy sad plains,
And their lamps sacrilegious invade the deep glooms
That wrap them to rest in thy Valley of Tombs!
VI.
Jerusalem, mother! we pray unto Him
Who has filled up thy chalice of woe to the brim:
"A curse on the tyrants whose impious hands
Have seized thee, denied thee, and bound thee in bands!
VII.
"O send down, Jehovah! by night and by day,
Thy blight on apostate impostors, we pray;
The Christian deceivers, whose God we nailed fast [Footnote 172]
To the tree of the cross as a sail to the mast!
VIII.
"Since the hour he was crucified outside thy gate,
His blood like a poison has mixed in thy fate!
May the God of thy fathers, the God of our race,
From thy forehead, Jerusalem, wipe the disgrace!
[Footnote 172: The Jews cursed the Christians three times a day in their synagogues, says Epiphanius in this direful form, "Send down thy curse, God! on the Christians.">[
During the delivery of the first verses tears flowed down the cheeks of Judith. During the last part fire seemed to flash from her eyes.
After Ephrem others were induced to sing or deliver pieces in the languages of their respective countries. In the reign of Domitian, the Sarmatians, Dacians, Parthians, and the German tribes beyond the Rhine had been completely subdued. Agricola had broken on the Grampians the fierce hardihood of the tribes beyond the Tay and Tweed. The success of the Jewish war in the two preceding reigns had scattered that unfortunate race over the earth. We can thence understand how on a large estate like that of Aurelian so many nationalities met. Leaving them to amuse themselves, we will follow Zoilus.
He left the hall quietly, crossed the outer court and a paddock between it and the villa, and entered through a low-arched door into the garden behind it. Between this garden and the villa was the peristyle, a rectangular area so named from having stone pillars around it. In its centre was a xystus with box and other shrubs, shaped like tigers, lions, and galleys. The deepening shades of evening brought out their figures with weird-like indistinctness. Judith the Jewess stood between two pillars, and as she stood, tall, straight, and motionless, might have passed for the guardian goddess of the place.
"I have been expecting you, Zoilus."
"You do not forget your promise, then?"
"No! my part shall be fulfilled as soon as you have complied with the conditions."
"Judith! these conditions are hard. I have my misgivings and fears about the part I have to play."
"Fears and misgivings?" she repeated. "These account for your changed manner this evening?"
"Yes, I have never known any one to end well who interfered with the Christians."
"Ha, ha!" she laughed ironically. "You fear the uncircumcised dogs!"
"Not them; but I fear their God."
"Their God! Is it the Galilean impostor?"
"Moreover," he went on, not noticing her question, "I do not like to betray the niece of our former owner Domitilla the consul. She was always good and kind to me."
"Look here," said the Jewess, baring her right arm, "see that scar, which after many years leaves a red seam behind. It was that girl, so good and kind, that drove her ivory hair-pin into the very bone, because I did not plat her hair to her liking. Was she not good and kind to me, Zoilus?"
"She was then young and thoughtless, but she is now different," he said.
"You see that tiger," she pointed to a shrub shaped like that animal, "does not the young cub betray the instincts of the full grown beast? But she is different, you will perhaps say, since she became a Christian. As well might you expect the drugs of Locusta [Footnote 173] to cure the leprosy. Have you heard what takes place in the private meetings of those fully initiated? Ah! there she can indulge her liking for human blood!"
[Footnote 173: A famous poisoner in the time of Nero.]
Zoilus was silent. Some struggle of feeling with principle was going on. Judith, observing him, exclaimed:
"A lustrum of five long years has gone by since you asked me to become your wife. I told you I would never be a wife, or have a husband, in slavery. It is in your power now to procure freedom for both. Do so, and Judith will be yours to-morrow. Hesitate now, and she takes back for ever the promise and the pledge she made you!" She left the peristyle before he had time to answer.
To Be Continued.
From The Popular Science Review.
On the Struggle for Existence Amongst Plants.
The quaint dictum, "Plants do not grow where they like best, but where other plants will let them," which is credited to the late eminent horticulturalist, Dean Herbert of Manchester, expresses a truth not yet half appreciated by botanists. It is a protest against the prevalent belief that circumstances of climate and soil are the omnipotent regulators of the distribution of vegetables, and that all other considerations are comparatively powerless. The dean's crude axiom has lately found a philosophical exposition and expression in Mr. Darwin's more celebrated doctrine of the "struggle for life, and preservation thereby of the favored races," and if to it we add that great naturalist's more fruitful discovery of the necessity for insect and other foreign agencies in ensuring fertility, and hence perpetuating the species, we shall find that the powers of climate and soil are reduced to comparatively very narrow limits. Before proceeding to show what are the causes that do materially limit the distribution of species, it may be well to inquire how far the hard pressed soil and climate theory really helps us to a practical understanding of one or two great questions that fall under our daily observation; of these, the following are the most prominent.
That very similar soils and climates, in different geographical areas, are not inhabited naturally either by like species or like genera; that very different soils and climates will produce almost equally abundant crops of the same cultivated plants; and that, in the same soil and climate, many hundreds, nay, thousands of species, from other very different soils and climates, may be grown and propagated for an indefinite number of successive generations.
Of the first of these statements, the examples embrace some of the best known facts in geographical botany; as, for example, that the flora of Europe differs wholly from that of temperate North America, South Africa, Australia, and temperate South America, and all these from one another. And that neither soil nor climate is the cause of this difference is illustrated by the fact that thousands of acres in each of these countries are covered, year after year, by crops of the same plant, introduced from one to the other; and by annually increasing numbers of trees, shrubs, and herbs, that have either run wild or are successfully cultivated in each and all of them. The third proposition follows from the two others, and of this the best example is afforded by a good garden, wherein, on the same soil and under identical conditions, we grow, side by side, plants from very various soils and climates, and ripen their seeds too, provided only that their fertilization is insured. The Cape geraniums, London pride, and Lysimachia nummularia in our London areas, the pendent American cacti in the cottage windows of Southwalk and Lambeth, are even more striking examples of the comparative indifference of many plants to good or bad climate or soil; and what can be more unlike their natural conditions than those to which ferns are exposed in those invaluable contrivances, Ward's cases, in the heart of the city? True, the conditions suit them well, and, with respect to humidity and equability of temperature, are natural to them; but neither is the absolute temperature, nor the constitution, nor freshness of the air, the same as of the places the ferns are brought from; nor is any systematic attempt made to suit the soil to the species cultivated; for, as Mr. Ward himself well shows, the arctic saxifrage, the English rose, the tropical palm, and desert cactus live side by side in the same box, and under precisely similar circumstances, and, as it were, in defiance of their natal conditions.
Let it not be supposed that we at all underrate such power as soil and climate really possess. In some cases, as those of chalk, sand, bog, and saline and water plants, soil is very potent; but the number of plants actually dependent on these or other peculiarities of the soil is much more limited than is supposed. Of bonâ-fide water-plants there are few amongst phaenogams. Sand plants, as a rule, grow equally well on stiffer soils, but are there turned out by more sturdy competitors; and with regard to the calcareous soils, it is their warmth and dryness that fits them, to so great an extent, for many plants that are almost confined to them, or are absolutely peculiar to them. So, too, with regard to temperature, there are limits, as regards heat, cold, and humidity, that species will not overstep and live; but, on the other hand, so much has been done by selection in procuring hardy races of tender plants, and so much may be done by regulating the distribution of earth-temperature, etc., that we already grow tropical plants in the open air during a portion of the year, and eventually may do so for longer periods.
Amongst the most striking examples of apparent indifference to natural conditions of soil and climate, I would especially adduce two. One is the Salicornia Arabica, a plant never found in its natural state, except in most saline situations, but which has flourished for years in the Succulent House at Kew, in a pot full of common soil, to which no salt has ever been added; the other is the tea-plant, which luxuriates in the hot, humid valleys of Assam, where the thermometer ranges between 70° and 85°, and the atmosphere is so perennially humid that watches are said to be destroyed after a few months of wear; and it is no less at home in north-western India, where the summers are as hot and cloudless as any in the world, and the winters very cold. I may add that the tea-plant has survived the intense cold of this last January, at Kew, on the same wall where many hardy and half-hardy plants have been killed.
It is, further, a great mistake to suppose that the native vegetation of a country suffers little and very exceptionally by abnormal seasons. The most conspicuous instance of the contrary that ever fell under my observation was the destruction of the gigantic gum-tree (Eucalyptus) forests in the central districts of Tasmania, which occurred, if I remember right, about the year 1837. In 1840, I rode over many square miles of country, through stupendous forests, in which every tree was, to all appearance, absolutely lifeless. The district was totally uninhabited, consisting of low mountain ranges, 2,000 feet above the sea, separating marshy tracts interspersed with broad fresh-water lakes. The trees, much like the great gaunt elms in Kensington Gardens during winter, but much larger, were in countless multitudes, 80 to 180 feet high, close set, and ten to twenty feet in girth; their weird and ghostly aspect being heightened by the fact of most being charred for a considerable distance up the trunk, the effects of the native practice of firing the grass in summer during the kangaroo hunting season; and by the bark above hanging from their trunks in streaming shreds, that waved dismally in the wind; for the species was the stringy-bark gum, that sheds its bark after this fashion. And not only had the gum-trees suffered, but the hardier Leptospermum (tea tree bush) and many others were killed, some to the ground and some altogether; so that, though my journey was in spring and the weather was delightful, the aspect of the vegetation was desolate in the extreme.
In such climates as our own, similar devastations are unknown, and, though we know that our island was once covered with other timber than now clothes it, we have every reason to suppose that the change was slow, and the effect either of a gradually altered climate, or of the immigration of trees equally well or better suited to the conditions of the soil and climate, but which had not previously had the opportunity of contesting the ground with the ruling monarchs of the forest.
Making every allowance, then, for the influence of soil and climate in checking the multiplication of individuals, we have still two classes of facts to account for: the one, that plants which succeed so well, when cultivated, that we are assured both soil and climate are favorable to their propagation, nevertheless become immediately or soon extinct when the cultivator's care is withdrawn; the other, that plants of one country, when introduced into another, even with a very different soil and climate, will overrun it, destroy the native vegetation, and prove themselves better suited to local circumstances than the aboriginal plants of the country. In the first case, the reasons are very various, all of them relating to the conditions of the plant's existence. Of these the two most potent are, the absence of fertilizing agents, and the destruction of seeds and seeding plants. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say which of these is most fatal in its effect. In the case of our annual plants or our cereals, which never run wild, it is the latter certainly; for they seed freely enough; in the case of many perennials, shrubs, and trees, it may be the former, as with the common elm and lime, which rarely or never seed in England, though the latter is so notably frequented by insects during its flowering season; whilst a third cause is to be found in their seedling plants being smothered by others, of which we have numerous examples in our common pasture grasses, which are, perhaps, the most prejudicial in this respect. A most conspicuous example of this is afforded by the common maple, of which the seedlings come up early in spring by thousands in the neighborhood of the parent tree, in lawns and plantations, but scarcely ever survive the smothering effects of the common summer grasses as soon as these begin to shoot.
When I visited the cedar grove on Mount Lebanon, in the autumn of 1860, I found thousands of seedling plants, but every one of them dead; and so effectual is the annual slaughter of the yearlings in that grove, that, though the seeds are shed in millions, and innumerable seedlings annually spring up, there is not a plant in the grove less than about sixty years old. It may hence have been sixty years since a cedar there survived the first year of its existence; that is to say, has struggled through its infancy, and reached the age even of childhood!
On the other hand, when once the natural conditions of a country have been disturbed, the spread and multiplication of immigrants is so rapid that it shortly becomes impossible to discover the limits of the old, indigenous flora. Take the English flora, for example. If we contrast the cultivated counties with the uncultivated, the difference of their vegetation is so great that I have often been compelled to doubt whether many of the most familiar so called wild flowers of the cultivated counties are indigenous at all; nay, more, I have been tempted to suspect that some of the more variable of them, as some species of chenopodium and fumitory, may have originated since cultivation began. In the uncultivated counties the proportion of annual plants is exceedingly small, whereas in the cultivated counties annuals are very numerous; and the further we go from cultivation, roads, and made ground, the rarer they become, till at last, in the uninhabited islets of the west coast of Scotland, and in its mountainous glens, annuals are extremely rare, and confined to the immediate vicinity of cottages. Let any one who doubts this contrast between the floras of cultivated and uncultivated regions compare the annuals in such florae as those of Suffolk or Essex, the North Riding or Cumberland, with those of the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Arran. And it is not only that annuals abound in the cultivated districts, but that so many are nearly confined to ground that is annually or frequently disturbed. The three commonest of all British plants, for example, are, perhaps, groundsel, shepherd's purse, and Poa annua. I do not remember ever having seen any of these plants established where the soil was undisturbed, or where, if undisturbed, they had not been obviously brought by man or the lower animals; and yet I have gathered one of these, the shepherd's purse, in various parts of Europe, in Syria, in the Himalayas, in Australia, New Zealand, and the Falkland Islands. Were England to be depopulated, I believe that in a very few years these plants, and a large proportion of our common annual "wild flowers," would become exceedingly rare or extinct, such as the poppies, fumitories, trefoils, fedias, various species of speed-well, polygonum, mallow, euphorbia, thlaspi, senebiera, medicago, anthemis, centaurea, linaria, lamium, etc., etc.
It is usually said of some of the above-named plants that they prefer cultivated ground, nitrogenous soil, and so forth; and this is no doubt true, but that they will flourish where no such advantages attend them, a very little observation shows; and that they do not continue to flourish elsewhere is due mainly to the fact that, being annuals, their room is taken as soon as they die, and the next year's seedling has no chance of success in the struggle with perennials.
For good instances of this rapid replacement of annuals by perennials, the new railroad embankments should be examined. Whence the plants come from which spring up like magic in the cuttings many feet below the surface of the soil, is a complete mystery, and reminds us of the so-called spontaneous generation of protozoa in newly made infusions or in distilled water. In the south of Scotland in 1840-50, and many parts of the north of England, the first plant that made its appearance was Equisetum arvense, which covered the new-formed banks, for miles and miles, with the most lovely green forest of miniature pines. In the following year comparatively few of these were to be seen, and coltsfoot, dandelions, and other biennials, especially umbelliferae, with a great number of annuals, presented themselves. For many successive years I had no opportunity of watching the struggle for life on these banks, but when I last saw them they were clothed with perennial grasses, docks, plantains, and other perennial rooted plants.
The destruction of native vegetations by introduced is a subject that has only lately attracted much attention, but it has already assumed an aspect that has startled the most careless observer. Some thirty years ago the fecundity of the horse and European cardoon in the Argentine provinces of South America, so graphically described by Sir Edmund Head, drew the attention of naturalists to the fact that animals and plants did not necessarily thrive best where found in an indigenous condition; and the spread of the common Dutch clover, Trifolium repens, in North America, where it follows the footsteps of man through the pathless forests, has long afforded an equally remarkable instance of vegetable colonization. Still more recently in South Africa, Australia, and Tasmania, the Scotch thistle, brier rose, xanthium, plantain, docks, etc., have all become noxious weeds; and this leads me to the last and most curious point to which I shall allude in this article, namely, that the same annuals and other weeds that are held so well in check by the indigenous perennial plants of our country, when transplanted to others, show themselves superior to the perennial vegetation of the latter. Of this New Zealand furnishes the most conspicuous example; it was first visited scarcely more than 100 years ago, and it is not yet fifty since the missionaries first settled in it, and scarce thirty since it received its earliest colonists. The islands contain about 1,000 species of flowering plants, amongst which no fewer than 180 European weeds have been recorded as intruding themselves and having become thoroughly naturalized; and probably double that number will yet be found, as they have never been systematically collected; but the most curious part of the history is this, that whereas of indigenous New Zealand plants scarcely any are annual, no less than half the naturalized European ones are annual.
Of the effect of these introduced European plants in destroying the native vegetation, I have given examples in an article that appeared in the Natural History Review, (January, 1864,) from which I quote the following:
In Australia and New Zealand, the noisy train of English emigration is not more surely doing its work than the stealthy tide of English weeds, which are creeping over the surface of the waste, cultivated, and virgin soil, in annually increasing numbers of genera, species, and individuals. Apropos of this subject, a correspondent, (W. T. Locke Travers, Esq., F.L.S.,) a most active New Zealand botanist, writing from Canterbury, says: "You would be surprised at the rapid spread of European and other foreign plants in this country. All along the sides of the main lines of road through the plains, a Polygonum, (aviculare,) called 'cow-grass,' grows most luxuriantly, the roots sometimes two feet in depth, and the plants spreading over an area from four to five feet in diameter. The dock (Rumex obtusifolius or R. crispus) is to be found in every river-bed, extending into the valleys of the mountain rivers until these became mere torrents. The sow-thistle is spread all over the country, growing luxuriantly nearly up to 6,000 feet. The watercress increases in our still rivers to such an extent as to threaten to choke them altogether; in fact, in the Avon, a still, deep stream running through Christ Church, the annual cost of keeping the river free for boat navigation and for purposes of drainage exceeds £300. I have measured stems twelve feet long and three quarters of an inch in diameter. In some of the mountain districts, where the soil is loose, the white clover is completely displacing the native grasses, forming a close sward. Foreign trees are also very luxuriant in growth. The gum-trees of Australia, the poplars, and willows particularly grow most rapidly. In fact, the young native vegetation appears to shrink from competition with these more vigorous intruders."
Dr. Haast, F.L.S., the eminent explorer and geologist, also writes to me as follows:
"The native (Maori) saying is, 'As the white man's rat has driven away the native rat, as the European fly drives away our own, and the clover kills our fern, so will the Maoris disappear before the white man himself." It is wonderful to behold the botanical and zoological changes which have taken place since first Captain Cook set foot in New Zealand. Some pigs, which he and other navigators left with the natives, have increased and run wild in such a way that it is impossible to destroy them. There are large tracts of country where they reign supreme. The soil looks as if ploughed by their burrowing. Some station-holders of one hundred thousand acres have had to make contracts for killing them at sixpence per tail, and as many as twenty-two thousand on a single run have been killed by adventurous parties without any diminution being discernible. Not only are they obnoxious by occupying the ground which the sheep farmer needs for his flocks, but they assiduously follow the ewes when lambing, and devour the poor lambs as soon as they make their appearance. They do not exist on the western side of the Alps, and only on the lower grounds on the eastern side where snow seldom falls, so that the explorer has not the advantage of profiting by their existence, where food is scarcest. The boars are sometimes very large, covered with long black bristles, and have enormous tusks, resembling closely the wild boar of the Ardennes, and they are equally savage and courageous,
"Another interesting fact is the appearance of the Norwegian rat. It has thoroughly extirpated the native rat, and is to be found everywhere, even in the very heart of the Alps, growing to a very large size. The European mouse follows it closely, and, what is more surprising, where it makes its appearance, it drives, in a great degree, the Norway rat away. Amongst other quadrupeds, cattle, dogs, and cats are found in a wild state, but not abundantly.
"The European house-fly is another importation. When it arrives, it repels the blue-bottle of New Zealand, which seems to shun its company. But the spread of the European insect goes on very slowly, so that settlers, knowing its utility, have carried it in boxes and bottles to their new inland stations."
But the most remarkable fact of all has been communicated to me since the above was printed, namely, that the little white clover and other herbs are actually strangling and killing outright the New Zealand flax, (Phormium tenax,) a plant of the coarsest, hardest, and toughest description, that forms huge matted patches of woody rhizomes, which send up tufts of sword-like leaves six to ten feet high, and inconceivably strong in texture and fibre. I know of no English plant to which the New Zealand flax can be likened so as to give any idea of its robust constitution and habit to those who do not know it; in some respects the great matted tussocks of Carex paniculata approach it. It is difficult enough to imagine the possibility of white clover invading our bogs, and smothering the tussocks of this carex, but this would be child's play in comparison with the resistance the phormium would seem to offer.
The causes of this prepotency of the European weeds are probably many and complicated; one very powerful one is the nature of the New Zealand climate, which favors the duration of life in individuals, and hence gives both perennials and annuals a lengthened growing season, and, in the case of some, more than one seed crop in the year. This is seen in the tendency of mignonette and annual stocks to become biennial and even perennial, in the indigenous form of Cardamine hirsuta being perennial, and in the fact that many weeds that seed but once with us seed during a greater part of the year in New Zealand. Another cause must be sought in the fact that more of their seeds escape the ravages of birds and insects in New Zealand than in England; the granivorous birds and insects that follow cultivation not having been transported to the antipodes with the weeds, or, at least, not in proportionate numbers.
Still the fact remains as yet unaccounted for, that annual weeds, which, except for the interference of man, would with us have no chance in the struggle with perennials, in New Zealand have spread in inconceivable quantities into the wildest glens long before either white men or even their cattle and flocks penetrate to their recesses. Such is the testimony of Drs. Haast and Hector, and Mr. Travers, the original explorers of large areas of different parts of the almost uninhabited middle island, and who have sent to me, as native plants, from hitherto unvisited tracts, British weeds that were not found in the island by the careful botanists (Banks, Solander, Forster, and Sparrmann) who accompanied Captain Cook in his voyages; and which were not found by the earlier missionaries, but which of late years have abounded on the lowlands near every settlement.
This subject of the comparative great vis-vitae of European plants, as compared with those of other countries, involves problems of the highest interest in botanical science, and the subject is as novel as it is interesting; it is quite a virgin one, and requires the calmest and most unprejudiced judgment to treat it well. It cannot be doubted that the progress of civilization in Europe and Asia has, whilst it has led to the incessant harassing of the soil, led also to the abundant development of a class of plants, annual, biennial, and perennial, which increase more rapidly and obtain a greater development when transplanted to the Southern hemisphere than they have hitherto done in the Northern, and that, in this respect, they contrast strikingly with the behavior of plants of the Southern hemisphere when transplanted to the Northern; and hitherto no considerations of climate, soil, or circumstance have sufficed to explain this phenomenon.
Original.
The Leaf of Last Year
I know I am dry and decayed;
My skin is all yellow and sere;
I know I ought not to have staid
To become an old leaf of last year.
You are youthful, and merry, and green.
I feel like a stranger up here;
And can see you're ashamed to be seen
By the side of a leaf of last year.
My wrinkled and shrivelled up face
Excites you to laugh and to sneer;
And the branch thinks that this is no place
For an old-fashioned leaf of last year.
I can tell, as you toss your proud heads,
What you whisper in each other's ear:
"Old leaves should be gone to their beds,
'Tis no time for a leaf of last year."
You may flirt with the amorous winds;
With your joys I will not interfere:
But I'm sad; for my heart it reminds
How they jilted a leaf of last year.
Ay! flatter and laugh with the breeze,
You may think that its love is sincere,
But I know what it said to the trees
When I was a young leaf last year.
"Each one of these silly green leaves
Is so flattered if I but come near,
That she dances, and smiles, and believes
I most surely will wed her this year.
"With soft kisses the hours I beguile;
And their prattling is pleasant to hear.
When I tire, I depart with a smile
And a promise to meet them next year."
Then it came to my side with a bow,
Embraced me, and called me its 'dear.'
I was foolish to trust it, and now
It forgets its old love of last year.
Away the false summer breeze hied;
And my fibres all quivered with fear.
One by one my mates withered and died,
And left me alone till this year.
Soon autumn will come with its blast.
And your beauty will, too, disappear.
When you think on the joys that are past,
You'll remember the leaf of last year.
This morn, when the sun rose, I wept;
On my cheek lingers yet a bright tear:
'Twas a dew-drop fell there whilst I slept
And was dreaming about the last year.
Not long will I cumber the tree,
For my hour of departure is near;
And your beautiful branch will be free
Of its faded old leaf of last year.
Original.
The Influence of the Catholic Church Upon Modern Art.
As in many a sacred painting the divine persons are seen descending upon earth, attended by angels who, with trumpets, unheard by men, announce the visitation; so religion, revealed to prepare men for the next world, sits enthroned in this with all the arts, its ministers and servants. It is a glory of the Catholic Church that it has recognized to the utmost the spirituality of art. It has denied the dogma, of all dogmas the most absurd, that with the use of the highest powers of the imagination, and with delight in the beauty with which God has clothed the world, his worship is incompatible. It has not made piety a thing ugly, repulsive, barren; a mere assent of the will to an abstraction. The child of the church, standing in a world where the rainbow bends above him, and sunset opens the burning gates of heaven, is not taught to believe the seven colors the seven sins, or, at least, but secular beauty, to be banished from the house of worship; with the voices of birds' and winds, and waters, and the gothic grandeur of forests around him, he is not taught that music and architecture interfere with piety, or, if used at all in worship, must be limited to their lowest and simplest forms. Of creeds I do not need to speak; but this much it is necessary to say in the strict limits of my subject, that the world owes to Catholicism so much of its music, and painting, and architecture, that, had the world been without the church, these arts, though of human origin, and though highly developed before the Christian era, would in their modern forms probably be still in their infancy. In sculpture, undoubtedly, the Greeks surpassed even Michael Angelo; the statues of Phidias, though in ruins, are the wonder and despair of artists. The Roman empire built temples, roads, aqueducts, the Colosseum, and, when it fell, the arts, even in these less imaginative forms, seem to have fallen with it. For a long time there was no art worthy of the name in Europe. Apollo, blind and dumb, wandered without a home or a temple; for, though in those centuries there must have been men born to be composers, or painters, or sculptors, they were born too soon or too late. Athens had fallen; Christian Rome had not arisen to her destined greatness. So the world slumbered in darkness till the Catholic Church wrought the miracle by which the arts were raised from their tombs and made her interpreters and ministers. This cannot be denied, that she gave the impulse to the revival of art, encouraged its development, inspired it with energy, and purpose, and faith, and so sent it forth to bless and transfigure the world. In every city in Europe she built a cathedral. In Rome, St. Peter's; in Paris, Notre Dame; in Vienna, the Dom Kirche; in Milan, La Duomo. No town was without its church, few of them, without beauty, many monuments of the genius of their builders. Because the Saviour was born in a stable, it was not held an article of faith that he should be worshipped in barn. The church believed that the temple should show that it was built not for the service of man, but of God. To adorn these majestic buildings she summoned the sister arts. Through the stained windows,
"The panes
Of ancient churches, passionate
With martyred saints, whom angels wait,
With Virgin and with Crucified,"
the light shone holier for that transfiguration. There the painter told in language all could read the solemn story of the religion they believed. How in a manger the Christ was born, and worshipped by the wise men whom the mysterious star had led from the Chaldean plains; how the holy mother journeyed with Joseph into Egypt, bearing in her arms the babe who came into the world himself to bear the burden of its grief; how he taught the poor and healed the sick, raised Lazarus from the grave, and bade the Magdalene sin no more; how he spake with God upon the mount, and was tempted by the fiend, betrayed by Judas, tried by Pilate, and crucified upon Calvary; how at the foot of the cross the Marys wept all night; and how, when he was buried, angels rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and apostles beheld him ascend into the depths of heaven. Upon the sacred walls, which were to these pious, worshippers as windows opening into the Holy Land, they saw miracles, transfigurations, ascensions, the agonies of martyrs, the adorations of saints, and—vision of all visions fairest—the tender face of the Virgin bending in prophetic sadness above the infant Christ. But with other than silent teachers the church appealed to the soul. Music, whose miraculous voice utters all passions, pains, delights, and truths, breathed her beautiful religion on the air. She sang of what Raphael and Titian painted; of the birth, and the death, and the resurrection; of the prayers of penitence, the anguish of strife, the rapture of heaven, the torments of hell; and in her voice were heard sobs, and cries, and supplications, thunders of divine wrath, trumpets of doom and of redemption, and choruses upon choruses of angels proclaiming the glory of God. In all the arts the church embodied Christianity; as she converted souls, so she converted music and painting. By the twelfth century, nay, before that, all the art of Europe was Catholic. In Italy, Spain, Germany, wherever a school of art existed, however humble, its highest aspirations were through the Catholic Church. The ideality of art, as we may see in its remaining works, was then almost exclusively religious; to be imaginative was to be pious. Centuries before the dawn of modern painting, in the silence and seclusion of cloisters, laborious monks, slowly perfecting their wonderful illuminated missals, were unawares preparing the advent of Cimabue and Giotto. The tradition that St. Luke was a painter was carefully cherished by his disciples, who may have found inspiration in the legend that he painted the portrait of the Saviour. Thus it is probable, and other reasons might be cited, that modern art was not adopted by the church, but, born within its monasteries, was cherished till it grew too great for them alone, and then, as the child of the church, turned in natural faith and gratitude to the service of its parent.
The church was the chief patron of the early painters; it furnished not only their inspiration, but their occupation. There is little trace of the earliest Christian art; but Eusebius, whose history was written in the reign of Constantine, mentions that images of Christ were then common. In the third century pictures had been generally introduced in the churches of Palestine. But it was scarcely before the twelfth century that Catholic art gave promise of that splendor which in later days exalted it above all rivalry. We find Cimabue famous about the year 1250, and after him Giotto, almost the father of Italian art, whose portrait of Dante, recently discovered, is acknowledged as the best likeness we possess of the author of the greatest Christian poem. He painted the Last Supper of Christ, at Florence, and an idea of his influence may be formed from the fact that he had one hundred pupils, some of whom were afterward renowned. To catalogue the painters of this period would be unnecessary, but their close sympathy with the church, and the encouragement they received from it, are unquestionable. In 1308, Duccio, an artist of Sienna, was called upon to paint an altar-piece, and in his contract pledged himself thus: "I will execute it according to my best ability, and as the Lord shall grant me skill." The picture when completed was carried in solemn procession to the church. When, in 1438, it was proposed to build the Sienna Cathedral, it was ordained that "no one even suspected of immorality shall be eligible" to the position of its architect. A more earnest expression of the faith of the early artists in the dignity of their work, and their religious duty, is found in the rules adopted by the painters of Sienna in 1335. They held that, "since we are teachers to ignorant men, and since in God every perfection is united, we will in our work earnestly ask the aid of the divine grace." This spirit of devotion gave a higher direction to genius that might without it have wasted itself in empty and unmeaning tasks; and, whatever the artist was born to do, he found in the church his opportunity. To paint, in those days, for the best of those men, was to serve God; to build, was to build his temples. The purpose ennobled the work. Not merely with intellect Lorenzo Gbiberti labored when he wrought the doors of the baptistery in the rear of the cathedral at Florence—doors of which Michael Angelo exclaimed in his enthusiasm, "Worthy to be the gates of paradise!" Casts of these wonderful carvings of scriptural subjects, are exhibited in the Academy of the Fine Arts at Philadelphia. These artists were the worthy forerunners of greater men—of Domenichino, of Guido, of Titian, of Murillo, of Correggio, and of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo. The greatest works of the three latter were upon Christian themes. The Las Supper, painted by Da Vinci, in 1497, for the Dominican convent at Milan, is accepted as the crowning proof of genius. The statue of Moses in St. Peter's, the Last Judgment, and the Dome of St. Peter's are the master works of the mighty Angelo. Raphael, who began his beautiful career by painting altar-pieces, in the Transfiguration reached its highest point, and questionings of the model who sat for his divine madonnas is idle, for not the loveliness of the face, but the holiness of the spirit gives them immortality. But I need cite no other instances. The highest subjects of the Italian painters were found in their religion, and the church was their most generous patron. And not only was this dedication of art to spirituality of direct value to its intellectual progress, but indirectly it ennobled art that aimed merely to paint the things of earth and not the dreams of heaven. The less gained dignity from the sacred office of the greater, and art became more strongly rooted in that which was of the world, because of its aspiration to that which was celestial.
The vast influence of religion upon art is signally exhibited in the history of English art. Neither painting nor architecture, it is true, had made much progress in England up to the seventeenth century, as compared with their success on the continent; for, when Italy was civilized, Great Britain was still rude, and in certain respects barbarian. Yet the cathedrals which still exist in ruins, monuments of Gothic grandeur, were the expressions of a national art in close relation with religion. In England as in all other countries the Catholic Church gathered around her the arts. But with a religion which professed to see in images nothing but idols, in paintings of Christ and the apostles and the prophets nothing but profanity and blasphemy, came desolation and destruction. The Roundhead was not satisfied with the downfall of a throne, with the death of one Stuart and the banishment of that royal line, nor with the proscription of the Catholic religion. The men who followed Cromwell were iconoclasts, who destroyed Christian images to set up in their stead an idol of barbarian bigotry. They fired the churches, they shattered the statues, they made war upon the pictures of madonnas and martyrs without remorse or fear. They had driven out the Cavaliers, they were resolved to drive out the saints; and, as they had banished the church, they were bent upon sending art to keep it company. They succeeded but too well. Puritan enmity to the employment of painting in church decoration—the sweeping principle that art and religion could not be united and had different aims struck a blow at English art which almost ended it for three reigns. It did not, indeed, fully recover from the effect until near the close of the eighteenth century, when, as little more than portraiture, it was re-established by Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. To this day it is only in portraiture and in landscape that a great English school exists. There are many fine Vandykes, and Lelys, and Reynolds in the galleries of England, and many landscapes and marines by Gainsborough, Wilson, and Turner; but where is the historical painter who can be compared with Turner? Haydon, who bitterly complained that historical painting was not appreciated in England, and that those who by their wealth and position should have encouraged it cared only for their own faces on canvas, might have found the cause of its decline in the absence of any religious inspiration in English art. He admitted this truth, unconsciously perhaps, when he chose for his own subjects of "high art" Christ in the Temple and Lazarus coming from the Tomb. In the landscapes and marines of Turner there is imagination grander than Claude, or Poussin, or Salvator Rosa possessed; in Wilkie unsurpassed character is given to humble themes. But the English historical school is infinitely below English landscape and portraiture. The Boydell gallery, in which the best artists of the time were employed to illustrate Shakespeare, is an utter failure. Fuseli was fanciful and coarse; and, though I know little of Blake's pictures, it is safe to presume they were not equal to his strange and beautiful poetry. Did he ever realize with the brush such verses as
"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night"?
Reynolds failed when he sought to be imaginative, as the Death of Dido and the Deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort are proof. The defeat of the repeated efforts to establish an historical school of art in England must not be ascribed solely to a deficiency of genius in the men or in the character of the nation. Art and religion were divorced. Men worshipped God in one way, and painted in another. It is a significant fact that the pre-Raphaelite school, however objectionable in some respects, owes its highest success to the religious element which inspires it. Millais and Hunt proclaim that the rudest art must be spiritual, and thus seek to atone for centuries of infidelity to that truth.
Upon music the influence of the church has probably been even greater than upon painting, certainly as great. With no exaggeration, it may be said that to write the history of the composers who have written for the church is to write the history of modern music. What this fact implies will be understood by those who know that in none other of the arts has the term modern such significance; for, while ancient painting, sculpture, and architecture were based upon the same general laws which are now recognized as absolute, the principles of music, like her own sweet sounds, have changed and passed away from age to age. There is a known difference between what may be called the musical ear of this century and that of the sixteenth. What was then felt to be harmony, and embodied in the works of the great masters, is now discord. There was a time when consecutive fifths were common, a fact almost incredible to the musician of to-day. If such changes have occurred within four or five hundred years, the gulf which divides ancient and modern music must be deep and wide; and the latter, having little visible connection or known sympathy with the former, and originating in Christian Europe, must inevitably owe much of its character to Catholic civilization.
The oldest form of music known to us belongs to the church; it is the Ecclesiastical Chant of St. Ambrose and St. Gregory. The former, near the close of the fourth century, endeavored to give a fixed form to church music, and we may judge of his success from his Te Deum. The words and the the music of this noble canticle are still sung. Of the Ambrosian chant, St. Augustine wrote: "As the voices flowed into mine ears, truth was instilled into my heart, and the affections of piety overflowed in tears of joy." It is said that St. Ambrose composed the Te Deum upon the conversion of St. Augustine. Two centuries later Pope Gregory vastly improved the system of sacred music; from him we have the celebrated Gregorian chant, solemn, severe, and pure, and still heard in Lent and in the Holy Week. Such value did St. Gregory place upon music that he established a school for singers at Rome, which flourished till the tenth century. After the Gregorian chant little reformation in music was accomplished for centuries; but the next step was also taken within the church when Guido, a Benedictine monk, early in the eleventh century, discovered the musical scale now used. Modern rhythm was invented by a French priest about the same time, and for many years music owed all its progress to religious enthusiasm. Thus, Odington, an English Benedictine monk, in 1240, wrote De Speculatione Musicae, and John Muris in the fourteenth century did much to establish fixed rules of harmony. Counterpoint was slowly developed; the canon and the fugue were introduced; and the laws of music were gradually established as the basis of the grander and more ideal genius of the strictly modern system. We need not follow the history of the art from that great master Palestrina through the long succession of famous names destined to be remembered when those of kings are half forgotten.
From the first it has been seen the church recognized the sacred offices of music, and did not merely permit, but authorized and developed its use. It is true that at one time use led to abuse. In the sixteenth century composers for the church frequently forgot religion in science. "In this kind of composition," says Alexander Cheron, "the meaning of the words was entirely overlooked, and its tendencies were only to the display of the genius of the composers or the powers of the singers." The evil became so great that the Council of Trent even deliberated upon the suppression of music in religious service. Pope Marcellus II. had, indeed, resolved to banish all music but the Gregorian chant, when Palestrina composed a mass which made that step unnecessary. It was a revolution. Solemnity, grandeur, and purity were the elements of the new style, from which mere bravuras and all levities were excluded. Thus the power which authorized the employment of music had the influence to redeem it from degradation, till now the sacred music we possess embodies the genius of three centuries, and will, perhaps, endure longer than the finest lyric dramas. That the religious purposes of great masters have had vast influence upon the merely lyric composition is not to be doubted. We cannot raise one form of art without raising all. The author of Don Giovanni might not have achieved the full grandeur of that work had he not also composed his marvellous masses. Of the influence of Catholic music upon such minds, an incident in Mozart's life is proof. In his youth he heard the famous Miserere sung in the Sistine chapel at Rome—that strange and solemn harmony, composed two hundred years ago by Gregorio Allegri, for the sublime ceremonial of the Passion week. Pontiff and cardinals, when the Miserere begins, kneel around the altar, the church is darkened, the voices swell in tenor, and die into silence. Mozart twice heard this wonderful work, and then reproduced it note for note, and sang it with the exact method and feeling of the Sistine choir. And it is said that the effect of this Miserere upon him may be traced in all his other works. Haydn's piety is found in all of his music, chiefly in those masses which are known to all lovers of music. "In nomine Domini," "Soli Deo Gloria," he invariably wrote at the beginning of his scores, and "Laus Deo" at their end. When composing, if his imagination failed, he repeated his rosary, and, before beginning his greater works, he prayed to God for inspiration to praise him worthily. Of the composers inspired by religion, the list is long; longer, perhaps, that of those who unconsciously were influenced by it. When Haydn was asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he replied, The Seven Words. It was written for the service called the "Funeral of the Redeemer" at Madrid, in which the seven words uttered by the Saviour on the cross were uttered by the bishop, who explained each, and between each exposition Haydn's music in sympathy with the word was given. Upon his masses he lavished his pains, and generally required twice the time for a mass that he needed for a symphony.
Palestrina, Porpora, Clementi, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven, are but a few of the illustrious masters whose sacred music was dedicated to the Catholic Church. Handel's religious music was chiefly written for the English, and is embodied, as well as that of Mendelssohn, in oratorio. But, for my part, I do not think the form of the oratorio as well fitted for sacred music as that of the mass. An oratorio is generally sung in a concert-room; the words are frequently poor adaptations of the language of the Scriptures; its auditors expect to be entertained. Therefore, though the music may be perfect in itself, as in the "Total Eclipse" or "I know that my Redeemer liveth" of Handel, it does not seem that the form is suited to express the deepest emotions of worship. It is in the Catholic Church alone that music and religion are wedded. Who can translate into words the profound devotion inspired by the solemn mass in the cathedral service? Over the kneeling worshippers, the illuminated altar, the pictures of the crucifixion and the ascension, the intonation of the priest, "the dim religious light" shining through the stained windows, Music breathes her voice. As the great organ swells, and the deep-toned choir utters the despair of the Miserere, the heavenly beauty of the Agnus Dei, the exultation of the Gloria, the devotion of the Credo, etc., what soul is not bowed in sympathy with grief, raised with gratitude, or bathed in heavenly peace? I know no music that has a more profound effect. It is a part of worship. It expresses something to which words the most eloquent are inadequate. It is the glory of the Catholic Church, I repeat, that she has so freely recognized the spirituality of this act, and these who reject her creed are compelled to admit the propriety and supremacy of her service. How cold are the musical exercises of other churches, how little they express of this intense and passionate devotion. I do not think God is served by the exclusion of his greatest gifts from the ceremonial of worship, and that point is conceded by all sects which sing his praise. But, if any music is used, why not the best? If a hymn, why not a mass? If an organ, why not an orchestra? The objection that the Catholic Church would have its choirs composed of the best voices, its music written by the greatest composers, is too absurd to be answered; for, if the highest art is unfit for the purposes of worship, then by inevitable logic it must be shown that all art is unfit; those who hold such objections should consistently agree with the Quakers, and banish the simplest hymn. [Footnote 174]
[Footnote 174: The writer of this article is not a Catholic.—ED. C.W.]
More than this, if music may be worthily used, why not painting? The value of architecture is universally admitted, ever since it was shown by the Catholic Church, and music is more or less accepted as a mode of adoration by nearly all sects. Pictures, however, are admitted into Catholic churches alone. Is, then, the genius of Titian and Raphael less holy than that of Beethoven or Mozart? Is it right to sing the praise of God in his temple, wrong to paint the story of the Son of God upon the consecrated walls? We need not answer such questions, which are only introduced to show how it is by the Catholic Church alone that the religious influences of the arts have been first and fully understood, and by it alone that they have been made agencies of worship.
Further examination of this important subject cannot now be made, for in these limits it can be little more than suggested. If we generalize, we discover that all the great artists, in architecture, painting, and music have found their highest employment in the church, and that its history includes their biographies. Of its present influence it is unnecessary to speak, but it is felt most in architecture, at least in this country; the noblest church edifice in Philadelphia, perhaps in any American city, is incomparably the new cathedral. From what has been said, the depth, and extent, and value of the influence of the church upon art may be inferred; but no one can imagine the condition of our art had it been without the inspiration of religion. Majestic and venerable stands the Church of Rome; upon her walls the arts have registered their victories; for her the muses have forsaken the summits of Parnassus; to her the poet, painter, and musician have dedicated their genius; and, giving all they brought to her humblest and poorest worshipper, she has repaid the masters with perpetual recognition and universal fame. Far as her realm extends are known the glories of Raphael, and Angelo, and Mozart.
Original.
Adelaide Anne Procter.
Next to imagination, genius is, perhaps, the faculty of the human mind about which we have had the most instructiveness and the least instruction. Yet every one who knows anything of it at all knows the two great types of genius that appear in history—extremes between which lie all minds of mark. One is the familiar form that the word itself at once suggests—the regular fashion, as it were, of being exceptional. This is the erratic, fitful, uncontrolled, keen, brilliant, sensitive, sympathetic, eccentric character, who wears regardless collars, fights his publisher on less than no provocation, eats opium if he chooses, and sometimes chooses—or, if not opium, some other stimulant—has whims and moods and irritabilities, and the biggest heart, and the best tongue, and the most heedless head, with the most brilliant oddities in it, wherever he goes—a totally lopsided organism, where the soul cannot be kept from wearing its way through the body, and where a few faculties, preternaturally developed, domineer over a warped and stunted system, to the ultimate ruin of the whole man.
The other kind, calm, clear, broad, poised, equable, powerful, seems exactly the opposite of the first type. The strength of the one is in balance, the force of the other in overbalance. Yet the difference is only that the man of balance is symmetrically developed; it is the difference between the autumn maturity of the full-grown fruit and the hectic ripeness, with the worm at the core, of the August windfall.
Of these two types, the first is vastly the more frequent, the other the higher in history. The reason is simply this, that a moderate degree of uniform development gives neither more nor less than mediocrity, while disproportionate preponderance of the intellect, even where all the faculties are below the average, will reproduce in miniature all the phenomena of the overbalanced kind of genius. Between Byron Don-Juanning it over his gin-and-water, and the brilliant Bohemian who dashes off the cleverest leader of the next day, fresh from the convivial influences of a roystering champagne supper, and the gentle youth who floods the rural poet's corner with heaven-scaling hankerings inspired by green tea, the difference is not in kind, but in degree.
Men of this order are the ones who achieve fame and famine. Their blossoms of promise are bright, their early graves are green on all the paths of human progress. History kindles at their high hopes and deeds, and blushes for the petty failings that suffice to drag them down. Literature, above all, is a very Golgotha, all the ghastlier for its glory, of their self-conscious sensitiveness, their refined self-torture, their blasted lives and miserable deaths. Yet there is hardly one but has his little day, longer or shorter, but with always some little sunshine and flowers of popular favor. Stimulated to their utmost by susceptibility to praise, they are the most brilliant and bizarre in effects, and the most blindly admired. Besides, their eccentricities are an advertisement in themselves, and very often first attract the attention which afterward discovers the powers underneath. The world, on the contrary, finds nothing about the other sort of genius to display any peculiar capabilities—a sort of pleasant self-completeness, it may be, but no salient points and queer angles—and passes on, to gape at the man with half the brains and nothing to balance them. Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous: some one in Elizabeth's reign made a list (is it not D'Israeli who preserves it?) of the best writers of his day, whereon the thirteenth name is that of the successful London manager and decidedly good fellow, William Shakspeare.
In fact, this latter type of genius is not only rare as all well-poised organisms are rare, but seems to evade public appreciation by some hidden inherent law of its nature. It has often happened with men of this order that not only their families—of course, it is the exception, if a man's family ever discover his powers till the rest of the world thunders his fame into their ears—but their daily acquaintance, their most intimate friends, nay, themselves, never suspect their greatness.
But, if such a man of genius is an event of his generation, and, with all a man's opportunities for appreciation, activity, acquaintance, and, above all, women and their ennobling influence, to bring out his best energies, often dies undiscovered, what chance is there for a woman of kindred abilities to struggle into the light of recognition? In literature, men are the severest judges of women possible, except, of course, their own sex. To the best of them the expression "woman of genius" is the mythical relic of some lost tradition as old as Sappho's day, and "women's thought" a contradiction in terms. All their experience teaches them to disbelieve in it utterly. The truth is, most women think very ill in print. The cause lies less in their nature than in their second nature of education. Their thought is beautiful enough—beauty is their mental as their bodily characteristic—but seldom strong, and then its strength is that of the tempered Toledo rather than the shearing Andrea Ferrara. It comes in April gleams from behind cloud after cloud. They lack concentration, terseness, sequence; in a word, training. This breeds, with mainly correct thought, constant loose digressions, diffuseness of expression, and dilution of ideas. (Hence that saddest thing on the earth, wherein women writers so abound, the unexceptionable poem.) It seems as though women wrote as if conversing, forgetting how much of the charm is in themselves and evaporates on the pen. Every reader has noticed how the writings, and, above all, the poems, of really extraordinary women—women that men of mind looked up to—are to us such monuments of apparent mediocrity that we wonder what they found to worship. The most impartial critic's nose inclines involuntarily heavenward the moment a woman comes forward to claim any intellectual place of honor. And genius, the highest quality, man's special prerogative—horror of horrors! All reason says it cannot be; and underneath a subtle male esprit de corps too often adds that it shall not be. Of course, the intruder cannot climb the heights, but to avoid accidents and disappointment she is seldom suffered to try. Such are the difficulties which beset the path of even the most favored female aspirant.
It ought not to surprise us, then, that Adelaide Anne Procter, even had she been the most pushing and irrepressible of blue-stockings, with every vantage-ground of circumstance, was not appreciated as she deserved. But, in addition to the original sin of being a woman, several reasons peculiar to herself concurred to render her, what we think she has been, one of the most underrated writers of her day.
First, she was an Englishwoman. Had she not been, she might never have been anything; but once being something, we do not think it was an utterly inestimable advantage. For, as being English, every one took for granted that she must be a Protestant, and every one was disappointed and provoked to find her a Catholic. Now one of the circumstances which mitigate the glory of being English is that there is very little achromatic criticism in England. As a wise and keen analyst [Footnote 175] complains, each of the reviews has some set of theses nailed to its doors, whose upholding is the first thing, to which all their criticism proper must stand subordinate.
[Footnote 175: Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism.]
English bigotry, under nineteenth century forms, is to-day as patent, as understood, as calculable a mainspring and motive of public judgment as in Archbishop Laud's era. Miss Procter's chance of any high praise was thus never very great. But appearing as she did on the scene of letters at a time when the Church of England was yet in the full sanctimoniousness of righteous reaction against the dismembering logic of the Puseyites, any good there was in her was very safe from discovery by most of the critics. Had she been a self asserting sectarian, cramming her dogmas, as some of us did their abolitionism, down her readers' throats, she might have been hunted down to fame by the indignant zeal of the saintly star-chamberers of letters, who lead public opinion much as the foam leads the wave. Unfortunately for this opening, Miss Procter was a lady, and such self-assertion the most foreign of traits to her nature. Not loud enough for martyrdom, she was just firmly Catholic enough for misjudgment, or rather for denial of judgment. While the tribunals of criticism could not avoid taking notice of a book by Barry Cornwall's daughter, still, with all the little good and ill the reviewers said of her, they never did her the one essential service they could render, of putting her name where the reading public would see it and pass judgment on her. There is a way of praising that keeps off, and a way of blaming that attracts, the mass of readers.
With the returning tide of ritualism, she has begun to be more appreciated, but it is only a beginning. We are so strongly inclined to think her poems at the outset of a new career in public favor, and we consider that so little justice has been done her in the critical journals of this country, that we cannot help feeling toward them accordingly; and so, in range of our attempted discussion of her merits, and copiousness of citation, we have treated her in all respects precisely as a new author.
For we believe sincerely that the clouds of circumstance and prejudice about Miss Procter's entrance into literary life have obscured from us poetical powers not only of no common order, but of that calm, self-centred kind we have spoken of as rare enough in man, and the feminine counterpart of which is almost unknown in literary history. Her mind is not Shakespeare's, nor Coleridge's, nor Goethe's, but the resistless river and the fountain of the rocks may both be the overflow of the same sunless reservoir in the deep bosom of the mountains. And her poetry is indeed a fountain of the rocks; pure, placid, deep of source, shaded yet sparkling, "making a quiet music all its own;" with no torrent nor show of force, yet musically passing all obstacles, and emerging, clear, bright, and beautiful, in the sunlight beyond. Most varied and versatile in her choice of subjects, she brings to all a poetic insight, a freedom and fancy of expression, a grasp of the topic, and, above all, a strange, noble earnestness, that altogether make up a style whose quiet charm we had rather easily illustrate than elaborately fail in describing.
The key-note of all her writings is thoughtfulness, and withal a peculiar kind of thoroughness of thought such as we have found in no other woman. Mrs. Browning (perhaps we ought to add the new Mrs. Augusta Webster, whose perceptive powers are the theme of the English reviews) is the only one who ever has analyzed nearly so well, and she and all the others seem only incidentally, while Miss Procter is habitually, analytical. Her entire superiority, indeed, is the consequence and corollary of this curious depth of mind. Bold in abstractions, tender in revealings of the heart, ingenious in incident and invention, she is sure to have a well-defined thought at bottom, always suggestive, often philosophic, sometimes profound. The rare combination of entire femininity with this thinking habit is an originality in itself. Very novel and very charming is the effect of seeing together with this strong, clear, searching introspection, all the woman's delicacy of touch.
But the reader is tired of our generalities, and would much rather see for himself how well Miss Procter thinks. So we give him a fair example in the poem called
Incompleteness.
Nothing resting in its own completeness
Can have power or beauty; but alone
Because it leads and tends to further sweetness,
Fuller, higher, deeper than its own.
Spring's real glory dwells not in the meaning,
Gracious though it be, of her blue hours,
But is hidden in her tender leaning
To the summer's richer wealth of flowers.
Dawn is fair because the mists fade slowly
Into day, which floods the world with light;
Twilight's mystery is so sweet and holy
Just because it ends in starry night.
Childhood's smiles unconscious graces borrow
From strife that in a far-off future lies;
And angel glances (veiled now by life's sorrow)
Draw our hearts to some beloved eyes.
Life is only bright when it proceedeth
Toward a truer, deeper life above;
Human love is sweetest when it leadeth
To a more divine and perfect love.
Learn the mystery of progression duly:
Do not call each glorious change decay;
But know we only hold our treasures truly,
When it seems as if they passed away.
Nor dare to blame God's gifts for incompleteness;
In that want their beauty lies; they roll
Toward some infinite depth of love and sweetness,
Bearing onward man's reluctant soul.
This poem holds one of the great principles in Miss Procter's very noble theory of life—a theory abundantly developed in her poems. Her cardinal axioms would seem to be three: The great rule of life is progression; its great agent, sorrow; its great fact and end, love. On these pillars she builds, and 'Incompleteness' is one of the most direct statements of one part of her creed. Another fine poem, in thought a kind of companion-piece to this, in which we readily recognize the same underlying thought, is
Beyond.
We must not doubt, or fear, or dread that love for
life is only given,
And that the calm and sainted dead will meet
estranged and cold in heaven:
Oh! love were poor and vain, indeed, based on so
harsh and stern a creed.
True that this earth must pass away
with all the starry worlds of light,
With all the glory of the day, and calmer tenderness
of night,
For in that radiant home can shine alone
the immortal and divine.
Earth's lower things—her pride, her fame,
her science, learning, wealth, and power,
Slow growths that through long ages came,
or fruits of some convulsive hour,
Whose very memory must decay—heaven is
too pure for such as they.
They are complete; their work done.
So let them sleep in endless rest.
Love's life is only here begun, nor is,
nor can be, fully blest;
It has no room to spread its wings,
amid this crowd of meaner things.
Just for the very shadow thrown upon its
sweetness here below,
The cross that it must bear alone,
and bloody baptism of woe,
Crowned and completed through its pain,
we know that it shall rise again.
So, if its flame burn pure and bright,
here where our air is dark and dense,
(And nothing in this world of night
lives with a living so intense,)
When it shall reach its home at length,
how bright its light! how strong its strength!
And while the vain weak loves of earth
(for such base counterfeits abound)
Shall perish with what gave them birth—
their graves are green and fresh around—
No funeral song shall need to rise
for the true love that never dies.
If in my heart I now could fear that,
risen again, we should not know
What was our life of life when here—the
hearts we loved so much below
I would arise this very day
and cast so poor a thing away.
But love is no such soulless clod;
living, perfected it shall rise,
Transfigured in the light, of God,
and giving glory to the skies:
And that which makes this life so sweet
shall render heaven's joy complete.
As a poem, this latter is superior, because it applies beautifully to a beautiful subject the principle which the other merely enunciates. And the style is not less remarkable than the ideas. Can anything be more clearly, calmly right than the thought, more easy, lucid, real than its utterance? And it is not the bald perspicuity, either, of mere logical disquisition, but full of suggestion and spirit; and it does not flag; especially in Beyond there is not a weak line nor lower thought. Now is not all this refreshing after the diffuse grace and dilute sweetness of female poetry in general? It is to the run of it as a copse of May's arbutus to a meadow strewn with buttercups.
Apropos of this superiority, we find another poem which illustrates it even more strongly, because so very many women have fluttered about the same thought. Every femme incomprise—and what poetess does not think she is one? is full of it; why have none of them said it so broadly and well as this?
Unexpressed.
Dwells within the soul of every artist
More than all his effort can express,
And he knows the best remains unaltered,
Sighing at what we call his success.
Vainly he may strive; he dare not tell us
All the sacred mysteries of the skies:
Vainly he may strive; the deepest beauty
Cannot be unveiled to mortal eyes.
And the more devoutly that he listens,
And the holier message that is sent,
Still the more his soul must struggle vainly,
Bowed beneath a noble discontent.
No great thinker ever lived and taught you
All the wonder that his soul received;
No true painter ever set on canvas
All the glorious vision he conceived.
No musician ever held your spirit
Charmed and bound in his melodious chains,
But be sure he heard, and strove to render
Feeble echoes of celestial strains.
No real poet ever wove in numbers
All his dream, but the diviner part,
Hidden from all the world, spake to him only
In the voiceless silence of his heart.
So with love; for love and art united
Are twin mysteries; different, yet the same:
Poor, indeed, would be the love of any
Who could find its full and perfect name.
Love may strive, but vain is the endeavor
All its boundless riches to unfold;
Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers
Ever in its deepest depths untold.
Things of time have voices, speak and perish:
Art and love speak, but their words must be
Sighings of illimitable forests,
Waves of an unfathomable sea.
The positive merit of this—passing the odious business of comparison—is, to our mind, the well-managed amplification of the main thought, and the swell both of sense and sound at the close, which we find a beauty of high order. The last two lines especially seize the melodic principle of the metre, which, beyond almost any other we know, calls for long musical words. Only "voiceless silence" strikes one as tautological to the last degree. Miss Proctor very rarely makes outright mistakes, and she may have seen some subtle sense added by the word "voiceless" that we cannot. All the silences we have ever known were strictly voiceless, and decidedly apt to terminate about the time any voice began.
The next great topic with our poetess is the sweet uses of adversity. She is never weary of celebrating the beauty and benignity of sorrow. In fact, she appears to have a personal friendship for misfortune, as the great elevating and purifying dispensation of earthly existence. Grief, disappointment, death, are to her philosophy but natural incidents, to be expected and met without fear—processes tending to the higher result hereafter. But here is her whole thought, better set forth than we can say it:
Friend Sorrow.
Do not cheat thy heart and tell her
Grief will pass away,
Hope for fairer times in future
And forget to-day.
Tell her, if you will, that sorrow
Need not come in vain,
Tell her that the lesson taught her
Far outweighs the pain.
Cheat her not with the old comfort,
"Soon she will forget:"
Bitter truth, alas! but matter
Rather for regret.
Bid her not "Seek other pleasures,
Turn to other things:"
Rather nurse her caged sorrow
Till the captive sings.
Rather bid her go forth bravely
And the stranger greet,
Not as foes with spear and buckler,
But as dear friends meet;
Bid her with a strong clasp hold her
By her dusky wings,
Listening for the murmured blessing
Sorrow always brings.
This is only one of a large number of poems full of varied exposition of these same views. Some are so ingenious and happy that we can hardly resist quoting them, were it not that, if those were the only qualifications, we should have to cite the major part of her poems. In fact, this conception of sorrow as a hidden blessing is peculiarly strong in all she has written. And yet, while recognizing in tribulation an elevating grace that wins it a welcome from her heart, she fully feels the sadness, the weariness, the poverty and pain of earthly lives. A strong instance of this is the "Cradle Song of the Poor," with its singular, sad refrain:
"Sleep, my darling, thou art weary,
God is good, but life is dreary."
And the miseries of the poor have evoked the only bitter lines she ever wrote, which, coming, as they do, the very last in her book, seem almost like an after-addition—the strange strong lines called "Homeless." There is a force in some of the lines that reminds us of Hood:
It is cold, dark midnight, yet listen
To that patter of tiny feet!
Is it one of your dogs, fair lady,
Who whines in the bleak, cold street?
Is it one of your silken spaniels
Shut out in the snow and the sleet?
My dogs sleep warm in their baskets,
Safe from the darkness and snow;
All the beasts in our Christian England
Find pity wherever they go.
(Those are only the homeless children
Who are wandering to and fro.)
Look out in the gusty darkness:
I have seen it again and again,
That shadow, that flits so slowly
Up and down past the window-pane:
It is surely some criminal lurking
Out there in the frozen rain!
Nay, our criminals all are sheltered,
They are pitied and taught and fed:
That is only a sister-woman,
Who has got neither food nor bed:
And the Night cries, "Sin to be living;"
And the River cries, "Sin to be dead."
.....
There is one other piece perhaps even sadder than this when we penetrate its full, stern significance:
The Requital.
Loud roared the tempest, fast fell the sleet;
A little child-angel passed down the street
With trailing pinions and weary feet.
The moon was hidden; no stars were bright;
So she could not shelter in heaven that night,
For the angels' ladders are rays of light.
She beat her wings at each window-pane,
And pleaded for shelter, but all in vain:
"Listen," they said, "to the pelting rain!"
She sobbed, as the laughter and mirth grew higher,
"Give me rest and shelter beside your fire,
And I will give you your heart's desire."
The dreamer sat watching his embers gleam,
While his heart was floating down hope's bright stream,
So he wove her wailing into his dream.
The worker toiled on, for his time was brief;
The mourner was nursing her own pale grief:
They heard not the promise that brought relief.
But fiercer the tempest rose than before,
When the angel paused at a humble door
And asked for shelter and help once more.
A weary woman, pale, worn, and thin,
With the brand upon her of want and sin,
Heard the child-angel and took her in.
Took her in gently, and did her best
To dry her pinions; and made her rest
With tender pity upon her breast.
When the eastern morning grew bright and red,
Up the first sunbeam the angel fled,
Having kissed the woman, and left her—dead.
Human waifs forgotten by all their kind are a sorrowful picture enough, but this of a human heart so desolate, so blank, so seared, so far from all hope or joy in life, that even God its Creator does not deny its supreme wish to die, is inexpressibly dreary. This is worthy to stand beside Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange."
One touch worth noticing is the fiction by which the angel is detained on earth; that "the angels' ladders are rays of light." It strikes us as one of the most ingenious we have ever met, and no less beautiful than happy. The whole structure of the narrative indeed, is admirable; it is difficult to see how the parts could be fitted more nicely. This skill Miss Procter has in an uncommon degree, and all her longer narrative poems exemplify it.
Of course, such thoughts on life as these last verses contain blend naturally with noble thoughts on death. Here, again, Miss Procter's prevailing thoughtfulness has developed her ideas into many beautiful applications. The lines called "The Angel of Death," which so touchingly close Charles Dickens's late sketch of her, the sweet, weary "Tryst with Death," and many others, are examples of this. But among them all there is none which more truly embodies her conceptions, or which, at the same time, is more deeply instinct with the hopefulness which underlies all her graver utterances, than the admirable lines:
Our Dead.
Nothing is our own; we hold our treasures
Just a little time ere they are fled:
One by one life robs us of our treasures:
Nothing is our own except our dead.
They are ours, and hold in faithful keeping,
Safe for ever, all they took away.
Cruel life can never stir that sleeping;
Cruel time can never seize that prey.
Justice pales, truth fades, stars fall from heaven:
Human are the great whom we revere;
No true crown of honor can be given,
Till we place it on a funeral bier.
How the children leave us, and no traces
Linger of that smiling angel hand;
Gone, for ever gone; and in their places
Weary men and anxious women stand.
Yet, we have some little ones, still ours;
They have kept the baby smile, we know,
Which we kissed one day, and hid with flowers,
On their dead white faces, long ago.
When our joy is lost—and life will take it—
Then no memory of the past remains,
Save with some strange, cruel sting, to make it
Bitterness beyond all present pains.
Death, more tender-hearted, leaves to sorrow
Still the radiant shadow, fond regret; We shall find, in some far bright to-morrow
Joy that he has taken, living yet.
"Is love ours, and do we dream we know it
Bound with all our heart-strings all our own?
Any cold and cruel dawn may show it
Shattered, desecrated, overthrown.
Only the dead hearts forsake us never:
Death's last kiss has been the mystic sign
Consecrating love our own for ever,
Crowning it eternal and divine.
So when Fate would fain besiege our city,
Dim our gold or make our flowers fall,
Death, the angel, comes in love and pity
And, to save our treasures, claims them all.
Her ideas regarding death are very lofty. They are equally removed from the timorous, painful harping on dissolution that characterizes the underdone poetic organism, from the graphic grimness of Miss Rossetti's class of thinkers, who seem to take a ghastly delight in anatomizing the subject, and last from the passionate weak welcoming of the end—the coward courage which dares not live. In a word, Miss Procter was a Christian.
In quitting her poems of thought, it will perhaps be well to pretermit our long course of praise, and speak of the faults of her writing, most of which are strongest in these very poems. In verbal correctness, she is far above the average; for so voluminous a writer, singularly free from them. Still, by G. Washington-Moon-light, we can discover certain errors, principally of accent or collocation. Some few appear in the verses we have cited. In "Beyond," "baptism" is made a trisyllable; though, standing where it does, an appeal might well be taken to the higher equity of rhythm against the arbitrary technicality of the law of orthoepy. Also, we doubt if "perfécted" be the best pronunciation to-day. And in "Homeless," in the expression,
"Is it one of your dogs, fair lady,
Who whines in the bleak, cold street?"
it might with all respect for the intelligence of the race at large, and, above all, for the prodigious latent capabilities of all ladies' dogs—it might be seriously questioned whether the canine personality is so marked as to admit of the relative "who." We feel quite sure that the original idea was to reserve this particular pronoun for selfish mankind, and we fear that the slow science of grammar is still fettered, even as to the most marvellous of the dog kind, by the trammelling traditions of comparative anatomy.
But such flaws as these are venial, occurring as they do at rare intervals, in a very large number of verses, written young, and crowded into the compass of a few years. Many of them were mere passing contributions to the periodical press of the day, and, taken as a whole, compare to advantage with the hasty emanations of almost any author.
In metre Miss Procter achieves no high effects, and attempts none. With very fair taste in selection of metre, she is by no means an artist in rhythm, and appears to aim at little or nothing beyond passable metrical correctness. She is carelessly harsh and incidentally melodious. Once or twice she tries some sort of irregular or lyric measure, and it appears rather to impede than aid her accustomed clear flow of thought.
In style she has two prominent though not great faults. One is her refinement. She is so refined that it would, even had she reached the full promise of her life, have prevented her, in all probability, from ever being broadly popular. Her field is too high and narrow: she deals mainly with sentiments and sympathies which interest only those who have not only sorrowed, but reflected. But this blame is praise in itself. The other is more of a real fault. Miss Procter tempts us to believe that the diffuseness which we have attributed chiefly to their education has some foundation in woman's nature itself. Different as she is from the ordinary type, her womanhood vindicates itself, though still in a way of her own. The effect on her style is not what we spoke of—dilution—but amplification. Sometimes she is led away by her fertility of illustration to illustrate too much. She holds up the idea in too many lights, more than are needful to understand her. There is a little of this even in "Incompleteness," before cited, but the illustrations are so happy that the effect is not perceived: it is seldom we are troubled with too many good things in a poem. Very often, however, this practice of ramifying thoughts into so many applications—one natural result of her thorough thinking—greatly injures the whole, and almost always, where there is much of this amplification, it passes beyond the strict limits of the strongest effect.
There are, furthermore, some few poems liable to cavil which seem to have been mere exercises or experiments, and call for other criticism than her finished performances. Others suffer from their author's inveterate habit of seizing on every-day subjects. Now and then she takes up one so trite that all the charm of her manner cannot mend it. The result is like a pebble set in filigree.
The only grave artistic fault we ever found in her poems occurs in the Legend of Provence, one of her best narrative pieces, founded on the exquisite Legend of the Virgin Mary's assuming the personality and filling the place of a nun who has proved false to her vows and fled her convent. Repentant at last, she returns, a worn-out beggar, to die where her religion died, meets her semblance, recognizes it as what she might have been, and implores Mary's aid.
And Mary answered: "From thy bitter past,
Welcome, my child! Oh! welcome home at last!
I filled thy place: thy flight is known to none,
For all thy daily duties I have done;
Gathered thy flowers and prayed, and sung, and slept;
Didst thou not know, poor child, thy place was kept?"
This strikes us as a tremendous blunder. For the nun to know that her place was kept would knock the bottom out of the entire legend. Who wouldn't sin with his pardon drawn up in advance, and entire secrecy and perfect restoration awaiting the first active twinge of repentance? We cannot imagine for an instant how Miss Procter could overlook this; unless we have made some equally egregious error in our understanding of the poem and its scope.
We find, or fancy we find, in her writings, a shade of resemblance to the taste and tact of her father, "Barry Cornwall." Perhaps it was because she feared her generic tendencies of style, that she has written few or no songs, and none at all like his sort. If her object was to avoid suspicious resemblance, she has succeeded. The likeness is utterly intangible, and there is not a trace anywhere of an imitation most natural to her relations with him, and which must have proved easy to talent like hers.
Another noteworthy fact about her is also alluded to by Mr. Dickens. It is the total absence of humor, and the sober and shaded style of what she has written. He takes occasion, while speaking of this prevailing seriousness in one so young, expressly to bar the inference that she was of the melancholy moonlit sort, and mentions her abundant wit, and keen sense of the ludicrous, and the joyous quality of her laugh. We do not think an observant reader would misconceive her, as her kind-hearted biographer apprehended. She lacks the distinctive element of morbidness. There is a soundness in her sadness, so to speak, that makes us feel it to be the shadow of a soul that knows the sunshine also. Mournful people of the true chronic mournfulness show it far more by taking dismal views of ordinary subjects than by dealing only in dismal things. But the fact itself suggests a curious question which our aphorists have not yet answered. How is it that some men naturally rollick in print, while others, not less humorous, write nothing but the gravest stuff? What made Hood's pen merry on his death-bed, and took the wit so out of Sydney Smiths's sermons? These two classes are so marked that one would think there must be a principle of some sort dividing them. Yet no one has ever laid down this principle. We no more pretend to do this than the rest, but merely raise the question, leaving it to some future critic to disentangle us from a most Cartesian dubitation.
Thus far we have quoted mainly in illustration of Miss Procter's characteristics. It must not be inferred, however, that there are not in her books excellences not specially arising out of her peculiar ideas of life. On the contrary, there are a number of pieces of that provoking class of good things which we might just as well have written ourselves—only we didn't. Very few of our friends, though, would think of looking in an English author for the following strong, spirited protest, written in 1861, when it was proposed to "strengthen the hands" of the mission for the conversion of Irish Catholics:
An Appeal.
Spare her, O cruel England!
Thy sister lieth low:
Chained and oppressed she lieth;
Spare her that cruel blow.
We ask not for the freedom
Heaven has vouchsafed to thee,
Nor bid thee share with Ireland
The empire of the sea.
Her children ask no shelter—
Leave them the stormy sky;
They ask not for thy harvests,
For they know how to die;
Deny them, if it please thee,
A grave beneath the sod;
But we do cry, O England,
Leave them their faith in God!
Take, if thou wilt, the earnings
Of the poor peasant's toil;
Take all the scanty produce
That grows on Irish soil,
To pay the alien preachers
Whom Ireland will not hear—
To pay the scoffers at the creed
Which Irish hearts hold dear:
But leave them, cruel England,
The gift their God has given;
Leave them their ancient worship,
Leave them their faith in heaven.
You come and offer learning—
A mighty gift, 'tis true,
Perchance the greatest blessing,
That now is known to you;
But not to see the wonders
Sages of old beheld
Can they peril a priceless treasure,
The faith their fathers held.
For in learning and in science
They may forget to pray:
God will not ask for knowledge
On the great judgment day.
When, in their wretched cabins,
Racked by the fever pain.
And the weak cries of their children
Who ask for food in vain;
When, starving, naked, helpless,
From the shed that keeps them warm
Man has driven them forth to perish
In a less cruel storm;
Then, then we plead for mercy;
Then, sister, hear our cry;
For all we ask, O England,
Is—leave them there to die!
Cursed is the food and raiment
For which a soul is sold;
Tempt not another Judas
To barter God for gold.
You offer food and shelter
If they their faith deny;
What do you gain, O England!
By such a shallow lie?
We will not judge the tempted—
May God blot out their shame—
He sees the misery round them,
He knows man's feeble frame.
His pity still may save them.
In his strength they must trust
Who calls us all his children.
Yet knows we are but dust.
Then leave them the kind tending,
Which helped their childish years;
Leave them the gracious comfort
Which dries their mourner's tears;
Leave them to that great mother
In whose bosom they were born,
Leave them the holy mysteries
That comfort the forlorn;
And, amid all their trials,
Let the great gift abide,
Which you, O prosperous England!
Have dared to cast aside.
Leave them the pitying angels,
And Mary's gentle aid,
For which earth's dearest treasures
Were not too dearly paid.
Take back your bribes, then, England,
Your gold is black and dim;
And if God sends plague and famine,
They can die and go to him.
This is by far the most unpolished and unequal thing Miss Procter has ever written, and full of faults of detail. But, spite of loose texture and repetition, and weak lines, and identical rhymes, there is a strength in all the essential features, and a spirit everywhere, that contrast strongly with the patriotic effusions that we have had so much of these last few years.
Another poem which has incidentally attracted no little notice is Homeward Bound, which anticipates the whole plot of Enoch Arden so completely that some shallow people felt called upon to say a number of very foolish things about the coincidence when Enoch Arden came out. The chief differences are that the ship-wrecked hero is thrown on a desert island in the one and captured by Moors in the other. Enoch Arden also turns away from the agonizing picture of his forfeited home in silence, while Miss Procter's mariner reveals himself, kisses his wife once more as if she were his, and departs, leaving the very awkward bigamy question wide open behind him, and in general evincing a noble ignorance of the law of England. He also perpetrates the dramatic error of surviving in a state of marine vagrancy for a quarter of a century. But, though inferior to Tennyson's, this poem has many excellent touches of pathos and nature, and must claim, equally with Enoch Arden, the full merit of its simple yet most telling conception.
Apropos of resemblances, we are tempted to quote another of her best known poems, both for its real beauty and because it subtly reminds us of Longfellow, and we should be thankful if some one would only tell us why:
The Storm.
The tempest rages wild and high;
The waves lift up their voice and cry
Fierce answers to the angry sky.
Miserere Domine
Through the black night and driving rain,
A ship is struggling, all in vain,
To live upon the stormy main.
Miserere Domine
The thunders roar, the lightnings glare,
Vain is it now to strive or dare;
A cry goes up of great despair.
Miserere Domine
The stormy voices of the main,
The moaning wind and pelting rain
Beat on the nursery window-pane,
Miserere Domine
Warm curtained was the little bed,
Soft pillowed was the little head:
"The storm will wake the child," they said.
Miserere Domine
Cowering among his pillows white,
He prays, his blue eyes dim with fright,
"Father, save those at sea to-night!"
Miserere Domine
The morning shone all clear and gay
On a ship at anchor in the bay,
And on a little child at play.
Gloria tibi Domine!
Out of many which commend themselves, we select only one more, a little gem which we were surprised and pleased to find copied the other day in a little New York evening paper. We think it very suggestive and sweet.
A Lost Chord
Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.
I do not know what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then,
But I struck one chord of music
Like the sound of a great Amen.
It flooded the crimson twilight
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.
It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.
It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.
I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
That came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.
It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.
We have yet to speak of one great element in these poems, their religion. With those who are born and bred in a church, their belief sits on them like their clothes—becomes a part of themselves. With converts it is oftener like a badge which they are proud to wear, and which some are fond of displaying. Miss Procter's was one of those rare natures in which religion seems to stain back, as it were, and color the very fountain-heads of all thought and impulse, as they are colored by the associations of childhood. In her, it was not like regalia for the processions of life or a reserve fund for emergencies, but thoroughly assimilated and vitalized; a living faith; an actual, practical element in her daily doings, as present in her consciousness as her own individuality. Nor had she any of the combativeness of converts, whose zeal is apt sometimes to be aggressively meek and intolerantly lowly. Hers was a faith full of the charity that judges not. Like all real feeling, it never obtrudes itself, and never shrinks from appearing in its proper place. Thus she has very few devotional and no sectarian pieces at all in her Legends and Lyrics, but once professedly entering on that line of thought, in her Chaplet of Verses, she is both Christian and Catholic throughout.
Yet among the few devotional pieces in the earlier series we find one of the best:
The Peace of God.
We ask for peace, O Lord!
Thy children ask thy peace;
Not what the world calls rest,
That toil and care should cease;
That through bright sunny hours
Calm life should fleet away,
And tranquil night should fade
In smiling day:
It is not for such peace that we would pray.
We ask for peace, Lord!
Yet not to stand secure,
Girt round with iron pride,
Contented to endure;
Crushing the gentle strings
That human hearts should know,
Untouched by others' joy
Or others' woe:
Thou, dear Lord! wilt never teach us so.
We ask thy peace, Lord!
Through storm, and fear, and strife,
To light and guide us on
Through a long, struggling life:
While no success or gain
Shall cheer the desperate fight,
Or nerve what the world calls
Our wasted might;
Yet pressing through the darkness to the light.
It is thine own, Lord!
Who toil while others sleep;
Who sow with loving care
What other hands shall reap:
They lean on thee entranced
In calm and perfect rest:
Give us that peace, Lord!
Divine and blest,
Thou keepest for those hearts who love thee best.
Very like this in sentiment are several of her best pieces, "Per Pacem ad Lucem," "Ministering Angels," and "Thankfulness." There are a number also addressed to the Virgin Mary, the best of which are too long for insertion. It is this which will restrict our quotations to one more piece, which breathes that lofty ardor that every struggling Christian has felt in his brighter hours of exaltation, and sighed to know that common moods cannot rise to it.
Our Titles.
Are we not Nobles? we who trace
Our pedigree so high
That God for us and for our race
Created earth and sky,
And light and air and time and space,
To serve us and then die?
Are we not Princes? we who stand
As heirs beside the throne,
We who can call the promised land
Our heritage, our own;
And answer to no less command
Than God's, and his alone?
Are we not Kings? both night and day,
From early until late,
About our bed, about our way,
A guard of angels wait;
And so we watch and work and pray
In more than royal state.
......
Are we not more? our life shall be
Immortal and divine.
The nature Mary gave to thee,
Dear Jesus, still is thine:
Adoring in thy heart I see
Such blood as beats in mine.
O God! that we can dare to fail
And dare to say we must!
O God! that we can ever trail
Such banners in the dust,
Can let such starry honors pale
And such a blazon rust!
Shall we upon such titles bring
The taint of sin and shame?
Shall we, the children of the King,
Who hold so grand a claim,
Tarnish by any meaner thing
The glory of our name?
But, although just to-day, in the present undeveloped state of woman's intellect, Miss Procter may strike us most by her advance in thought beyond her sex, she has a far higher claim on us for the admiration due to true womanhood. Where do these poets school their souls, that they come forth full of the experience of threescore years and ten? We know that Miss Procter died in the prime and summer of her days, with most of the great epochs and experiences of a woman's life yet before her. It is not even said that she ever loved; for the sake of him who should lose her, we hope it may be so. Yet her poems hold more tenderness and truth, more of real love, its anxiety, faith, fulfilment, more of woman's inner life, than any ten of the sweet soft natures who have taken these things to be their sole province; who fancy their inkstands are in their souls, and devote a lifetime of harmless harpings to rhyming some flutterings of heart and more flutterings of nerves. Here, as everywhere, we meet with Miss Procter's unfailing force and clearness, and tremble at first to meet it. For of all agonizing things (as many a sensitive nature can testify) there is none like the unconscious cruelty of pure intellect when it comes to deal with the strange intuitions, the noble unreason, the holy follies of the heart. But hand in hand with her inborn analysis comes such a womanhood, so deep, so delicate, so full of sympathy and sweet counsel, as passes words. This union it is, as we said before, that stamps Miss Procter a poet. We men cannot half appreciate this; the sisterhood of sex that her poems must establish with women who have loved and suffered is for some woman only to set forth.
It is difficult to choose any one poem which stands pre-eminent in these qualities. One which will show her insight into the seemingly contradictory impulses of a woman's breast is
A Woman's Question.
Before I trust my fate to thee,
Or place my hand in thine;
Before I let thy future give
Color and form to mine,
Before I peril all for thee.
Question thy soul to-night for me.
I break all slighter bonds, nor feel
A shadow of regret:
Is there one link within the past
That holds thy spirit yet?
Or is thy faith as clear and free
As that which I can pledge to thee?
Does there within thy dimmest dreams
A possible future shine,
Wherein thy life could henceforth breathe
Untouched, unshared by mine?
If so, at any pain or cost,
Oh! tell me before all is lost.
Look deeper still. If thou canst feel
Within thy inmost soul
That thou hast kept a portion back,
While I have staked the whole,
Let no false pity spare the blow,
But in true mercy tell me so.
Is there within thy heart a need
That mine cannot fulfil?
One chord that any other hand
Could better wake or still?
Speak now—lest at some future day
My whole life wither and decay.
Lives there within thy nature hid
The demon-spirit Change,
Shedding a passing glory still
On all things new and strange?
It may not be thy fault alone—
But shield my heart against thy own.
Couldst thou withdraw thy hand one day,
And answer to my claim
That fate, and that to day's mistake—
Not thou had been to blame?
Some soothe their conscience thus; but thou
Wilt surely warn and save me now.
Nay, answer not—I dare not hear,
The words would come too late;
Yet I would spare thee all remorse,
So comfort thee, my fate—
Whatever on my heart may fall,
Remember, I would risk it all.
The strength of this is in the rendering of that eloquent instinct of love which intuitively strikes the most responsive chord. Here it hits on the strongest appeal a woman can make to a man—to save her against himself. And no one can deny the boldness and beauty of the closing turn of thought.
The following poem bears a strong resemblance to the last in tone and train of analysis, with an element of calm fruition instead of the utter devotion. The one is love's June of trust; the other its September of fulfilment.
A Retrospect.
From this fair point of present bliss,
Where we together stand,
Let me look back once more, and trace
That long and desert land
Wherein till now was cast my lot,
And I could live, and thou wert not.
......
What had I then? A hope that grew
Each hour more bright and dear,
The flush upon the eastern skies
That showed the sun was near.
Now night has faded far away,
My sun has risen, and it is day.
A dim ideal of tender grace
In my soul reigned supreme;
Too noble and too sweet, I thought,
To live save in a dream;
Within thy heart to-day it lies,
And looks on me from thy dear eyes.
Some gentle spirit—love, I thought—
Built many a shrine of pain;
Though each false idol fell to dust,
The worship was not vain,
But a faint radiant shadow, cast
Back from our love upon the past.
And grief, too, held her vigil there;
With unrelenting sway,
Breaking my cloudy visions down,
Throwing my flowers away:
I owe to her fond care alone
That I may now be all thine own.
Fair joy was there: her fluttering wings
At time she strove to raise;
Watching through long and patient nights,
Listening long eager days:
I know now that her heart and mine
Were waiting, love, to welcome thine.
Thus I can read thy name throughout,
And, now her task is done,
Can see that even that faded past
Was thine, beloved one.
And so rejoice my life may be
All consecrated, dear, to thee.
There could scarcely be a truer sign of poetic power than the fidelity and finish of some of these heart-pictures. Out of many others we select two for contrast: one tracing the deep, dreary introspection of passive suffering; the other following out the subtle, restless impulses of pain with pangs. The first we take from a longer poem, "Philip and Mildred."
Dawn of day saw Philip speeding on his road to the great city,
Thinking how the stars gazed downward just with Mildred's patient eyes.
Dreams of work and fame and honor struggling with a tender pity,
Till the loving past receding saw the conquering future rise.
Daybreak still found Mildred watching, with the wonder of first sorrow,
How the outward world unaltered shone the same this very day,
How unpitying and relentless human life met this new morrow—
Earth, and sky, and man unheeding that her joy had passed away.
Then the round of weary duties, cold and formal, came to meet her,
With the life within departed that had given them each a soul;
And her sick heart even slighted gentle words that came to greet her;
For grief spread its shadowy pinions, like a blight, upon the whole.
Jar one chord, the harp is silent; move one stone, the arch is shattered;
One small clarion-cry of sorrow bids an armed host awake.
One dark cloud can hide the sunlight; loose one string, the pearls are scattered;
Think one thought, a soul may perish; say one word, a heart may break.
Life went on, the two lives running side by side, the outward seeming,
And the truer and diviner hidden in the heart and brain:
Dreams grow holy put in action, work grows fair through starry dreaming:
But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.
We hardly know which to like the better, the description itself or the moralizing. Very different, very far from moralizing, and yet even more to the life, is
A Comforter.
"Will she come to me, little Effie,
Will she come to my arms to rest,
And nestle her head on my shoulder,
While the sun goes down in the west?
"I and Effie will sit together
All alone in this great arm-chair:
Is it silly to mind it, darling,
When life is so hard to bear?
"No one comforts me like my Effie.
Just, I think, that she does not try,
Only looks with a wistful wonder
Why grown people should ever cry;
"While the little soft arms close tighter
Round my neck in their clinging hold:
Well, I must not cry on your hair, dear,
For my tears might tarnish the gold.
"I am tired of trying to read, dear;
It is worse to talk and seem gay;
There are some kinds of sorrow, Effie,
It is useless to thrust away.
"Ah! advice may be wise, my darling,
But one always knows it before;
And the reasoning down one's sorrow
Seems to make one suffer the more.
"But my Effie won't reason, will she?
Or endeavor to understand;
Only holds up her mouth to kiss me,
As she strokes my face with her hand.
"If you break your plaything yourself, dear,
Don't you cry for it all the same?
I don't think it is such a comfort,
One has only one's self to blame.
"People say things cannot be helped, dear,
But then that is the reason why;
For, if things could be helped or altered
One would never sit down to cry.
"They say, too, that tears are quite useless
To undo, amend, or restore:
When I think how useless, my Effie,
Then my tears only fall the more.
"All to-day I struggled against it,
But that does not make sorrow cease;
And now, dear, it such a comfort
To be able to cry in peace.
"Though wise people would call that folly,
And remonstrate with grave surprise,
We won't mind what they say, my Effie;
We never professed to be wise.
"But my comforter knows a lesson
Wiser, truer than all the rest,
That to help and to heal a sorrow,
Love and silence are always best.
"Well, who is my comforter tell me!
Effie smiles, but she will not speak,
Or look up through the long, curled lashes
That are shading her rosy cheek.
"Is she thinking of talking fishes,
The blue-bird, or magical tree?
Perhaps I am thinking, my darling,
Of something that never can be.
"You long, don't you, dear, for the genii,
Who were slaves of lamps and of rings?
And I—I am sometimes afraid, dear,
I want as impossible things.
"But, hark! there is nurse calling Effie!
It is bedtime, so run away;
And I must go back, or the others
Will be wondering why I stay.
"So good-night to my darling Effie;
Keep happy, sweetheart, and grow wise:
There's one kiss for her golden tresses
And two for her sleepy eyes."
We do not know where to look for anything like this. It is so graphic, so simple, so true. We, at least, never realized a scene so vividly, so minutely, with all the details we would notice if it actually happened, and not a touch beyond, unless perhaps after reading Maud Müller. The kind of force is in many respects the same, except that the woman-poet, as usual, says what the man-poet suggests of the inner life underlying. But it is excellently said, so well that one mentally declines to apply the principles of aesthetics, which would dictate Whittier's method as the more thoroughly artistic. How well the whole logic, or illogic, of that grand solace, a good cry, is given, and how natural and how sweet if one could only chance on an Effie that would not tell nurse all about it, to have a little "comforter" that would only know the grief and never care for the causes!
We have only one more poem to quote—one which we consider in many respects Miss Procter's best. If feeling, delicacy, pathos, truth, make beauty and poetry, this alone ought to entitle its author to distinction. Bare of all factitious ornament, carrying no overload of elegances, it goes straight to the heart of every mother, and strikes the deepest key-note in the organism of the world—motherhood. And it seems to us that, if all men today were to league against her memory, this poem should win her an immortality in the hearts of womankind:
Links With Heaven.
Our God in heaven, from that holy place
To each of us an angel guide has given;
But mothers of dead children have more grace,
For they give angels to their God and heaven.
How can a mother's heart feel cold or weary,
Knowing her dearer self safe, happy, warm?
How can she feel her road too dark or dreary,
Who knows her treasure sheltered from the storm?
How can she sin? Our hearts may be unheeding,
Our God forgot, our holy saints defied;
But can a mother hear her dead child pleading,
And thrust those little angel hands aside?
Those little hands stretched down to draw her ever
Nearer to God by mother love: we all
Are blind and weak, yet surely she can never,
With such a stake in heaven, fail or fall.
She knows that, when the mighty angels raise
Chorus in heaven, one little silver tone
Is hers forever; that one little praise,
One little happy voice, is all her own.
We may not see her sacred crown of honor,
But all the angels flitting to and fro
Pause smiling as they pass—they look upon her
As mother of an angel whom they know;
One whom they left nestled at Mary's feet—
The children's place in heaven—who softly sings
A little chant to please them, slow and sweet,
Or, smiling, strokes their little folded wings;
Or gives them her white lilies or her beads
To play with: yet, in spite of flower or song,
They often lift a wistful look that pleads
And asks them why their mother stays so long.
Then our dear Queen makes answer she will call
Her very soon: meanwhile they are beguiled
To wait and listen while she tells them all
A story of her Jesus as a child.
Ah! saints in heaven may pray with earnest will
And pity for their weak and erring brothers;
Yet there is prayer in heaven more tender still,
The little children pleading for their mothers.
In conclusion, we think the world will not know for a while yet how much it has lost in Adelaide Anne Procter. Her time to be missed will come when Catholic England will need to be represented in the national literature. For those who will force it into recognition, there will of necessity be strong rather than fine intellects. Then the world will turn back to her pages, and wish she were but there to represent Catholicity in England; then she will be carefully read, and, once this happens, her place is assured. And yet, even then, we can never know her as she was; for beyond almost any author we recall, Miss Procter impresses us as being far superior to her works. She is the best of examples of her own doctrine of imperfect expression. The fulness and fineness of her nature strike one from the beginning as being immeasurable by what she has written. There is something exalted and tender, rich and yet reserved, about the life which animates her poems, that interests us uncommonly. And when we come to read of her, what was her life and what its aims, and, above all, when we see how she is mourned by those who held her dear here, we recognize her for one of those rare and beautiful hearts whom God loves too well to leave us long, and conclude, in laying down these broken reflections of her spirit, that her noblest poem was herself.