Easter.
He's risen: O stars! rejoice; O angels! sing;
Though we stand dumb with awe, or doubting turn
To probe the wound above that heart where burn
Great flames of love. The saints with rapture fling
Their crowns before the throne, and angels wing
Their anthems through the air. Come, man, and learn
Where crowns belong; thy God-like soul should yearn
For them thick-set with every holy thing—
Good deeds, prayers, penances, all shining bright
With fire of charity. Rejoice again,
O stars! O angels, saints, and man! a Light
Is risen that floods the worlds with joy. No pain
Is felt this day; earth's moan may cease, and night
Grow bright with stars of hope—'tis heaven we gain!
Grapes And Thorns. Chapter XI. A Harvest of Thorns.
By The Author Of “The House of Yorke.”
One of the greatest severities in the imprisonment of a criminal is, probably, that he can no longer see the wide earth nor the free skies, so that not only is his body cramped, but his mind is thrown back on itself, and forbidden to send out those long tendrils which can sometimes shoot through the eyes, and fasten on distant objects, when those near by are repelling. Moreover, the universe itself becomes to him like another prisoner, and he can scarcely believe that the large, smooth creation sails uninterruptedly on its way when he sees of it but one little spot for ever shut in by the bars of his cell.
Mr. Schöninger's window in the jail had been low, giving him a sight of the street not far away; but his cell in the prison was higher up, and separated from the window by a passage. Sitting or lying down, therefore, he saw only a small square of sky; and standing, the topmost line of a blue hill became visible. Only one other earthly object was in sight; and as time passed by that became still less and less of earth, and assumed a variable but always supernatural character: it was the stone Christ that stood on the church not far away. He could see all of it but the lowest hem of the robe; and as it stood there, surrounded by air alone, above the narrow line of the distant hill, it seemed an awful colossal being walking in over the edge of a submerged world. At morning, when the sky was bright behind it, it darkened, the lineaments of the face were lost in a shadow that was like a frown, and its garments and its hands were full of gloom. At one season there were a few days when the risen sun at a certain hour surrounded the head with an intolerable splendor, and then it was an image of wrath and judgment. It wore quite another character on bright evenings, when, the setting sun shining in its face, it came, white and glowing, down the hillside, with arms outstretched, full of irresistible love and invitation. To see this image, he had to stand at the grated door of his cell. When sitting or lying down, there was no view for the prisoner but a square of sky barred off by iron rods; and as the earth rolled, his view travelled with it, day after day going over the same track in the terrestrial sphere. At evening a few pale stars went by, afar off, and so unaware of him that they were like distant sails to the shipwrecked mariner, hovering on the horizon and disappearing, each failure a new shipwreck to him.
One morning, when he opened his eyes just as day was beginning to flicker in the east, he saw a large, full star, so brilliant that it trembled in the silvery sky, as if about to spill its brimming gold. It was so alive, so intelligent, so joyous, that he raised himself and looked at it [pg 248] as he would have looked at a fair and joyful face appearing at the door of his cell. Surely it was like good tidings, that glad star in the east! He got up, and, as he rose, there rose up whitely against the sky the Christ of the Immaculate Conception, seeming almost transparent in that pure light.
The prisoner knelt on the stone floor of his cell, and lifted his hands. “God of my fathers,” he said, “deliver me! for I am turned in my anguish whilst the thorn is fastened!”
It was the first prayer he had uttered since the night of his arrest, except those outcries which were more the expression of anger and a devouring impatience than of petition. Having uttered it, he lay down again, and tried to sleep. He dreaded the thronging thoughts and tormenting pains of the day, and there was a tender sweetness in this new mood which he would fain have kept and carried off into sleep. To keep it by him, he called up that story suggested by what he had just seen, the star in the east and the Christ. He did not believe it, but he found it soothing. It came to him like David's song to Saul, and, though but a mythical story, as that was but a song, it kept down the tigers of anger and despair which threatened to rise and tear him.
It was his own Judæa, which he had never seen, indeed, but which was to him what the fountain is to the stream—the source of his being. How fair and peaceful was that silent night that overhung, unbarred by iron bolts, free from horizon to horizon! The holy city was sleeping, and by its side slept Bethlehem. Within a stable a fair young matron had just laid her newly-born child on its bed of straw, while Joseph, his Jewish brother, ministered to both, feeling sad and troubled, it must be, that those so dear to him were so illy cared for at such a time. The ox and the ass looked on with large, mild eyes, and warmed the air with their breath. It was poor, but how peaceful, how tender, how free! The open door and windows of that poor stable were to him more beautiful than the barred and guarded portal of a Herod or a Cæsar.
Yet with what a blaze of glory the Christian church had surrounded this simple human picture! The poor man who had been able to give his family no better shelter than a stable was held by them more honored than Herod or Cæsar; and cherubim, bright and warm from heaven, like coals just from a fire, drew near to gaze with him, and burned with a still white light above his head. They called this matron a miraculous mother, they showered titles over her like flowers and gems, they placed the moon beneath her feet, and wreathed the stars of heaven into a garland for her head.
How terrible and how beautiful was this Christian legend! The Jew had abhorred it as a blasphemy, and his blood chilled as he suffered his thought to touch one instant the awful centre of this strange group—the Babe to whose small hand these idolaters gave the power to crush the universe, on whose tiny head they placed the crown of omnipotence. It was useless to try to sleep. The soothing human picture had blazed out with such an awakening supernatural glory that he could not even lie still. He rose again, and stood at the door of his cell. The star had melted from sight, the peaceful, [pg 249] cloudless morning was spreading over the sky, and where the feet of the Christ stood on the hill-top the beams of the sun were sparkling. Beautiful upon the mountains were the feet of Him who brought good tidings.
“A Christian would call it miraculous,” he muttered, looking at that light; and he shuddered as he spoke. But that shudder did not come from the depths of his soul, where a new light and peace were brooding. It was like the clamor and confusion outside the doors of the temple when the Lord had driven forth the money-changers, and was less an expression of abhorrence than a casting out of abhorrence.
The Jew did not know that, however, nor guess nor inquire what had happened in his soul. He scarcely thought at all, but stood there and let the light steep him through. Some dim sense of harmony stole over him, as if he heard a smooth and noble strain of music, and for the first time since his imprisonment he remembered his loved profession, and longed to feel the keys of a piano or an organ beneath his hand. His fingers unconsciously played on the iron bars, and he hummed a tune lowly to himself, without knowing what it was.
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!”
Then, catching himself idle and dreaming, he turned away from the grating, took a book from the table, and began to read.
This book had been to Mr. Schöninger an intellectual substitute for that spiritual consolation which he had not. Finding early in his imprisonment that his mind was working itself into a frenzy over the horrors of his position, and injuring him physically more even than confinement did, he had begun the study of a language with which he was entirely unacquainted, and, whenever he found his thoughts accomplishing nothing profitable, he turned them resolutely to this study, and bent them, with the whole force of his will, to learning dry rules and regulations. The discipline had saved him much, but it had not prevented his growing thin and haggard, and loathing food, and almost forgetting how to sleep.
But on this morning study did not seem so much a refuge as a task. The prisoner lifted his eyes now and then from the book, and looked outward to the sky, and then dropped them again, still in a dream, and wondering at himself. So might the sea have wondered when its waves sank to rest beneath the divine feet of the Lord passing over.
How many times during those terrible months he had striven to produce a perfect calm in his own soul by calling up stoical thoughts, and all in vain; or, if not in vain, the only effect had been a temporary and enforced calm.
Nor was it unworthy a manly and reasonable character that such an effect as he now experienced should be produced by something which, apparently, appealed only to the artistic or the marvellous. Every soul has its beautiful gate; and if truth, walking about outside, should choose to enter by that vine-wreathed portal, and reach the citadel by way of gardens and labyrinths, instead of approaching by the broad avenue of reason, who shall say that it is not as well? Besides, in the artist, that gate stands always open.
It was those same sunbeams, shining on the hill-top, and speaking to the lonely prisoner of a dawn of hope and joy, which to Annette Gerald's eyes had flashed like the two-edged sword by whose lightnings the first sinners in the world had fled out into the desert. But this sorrowful daughter of Eve missed one of the consolations of our first mother; for Eve could lament aloud, and call on all creation to weep with her; but this later exile must take up her misery as if it were a delight.
She went about smilingly, making preparations for this little journey she had announced her intention of taking.
“But you needn't put everything in order, just as if you were never coming back again,” her mother said. “I'll see to things.”
She was sitting in Annette's chamber, and watching her at work.
“Well, mamma, just as you please,” the daughter answered gently, and touched her mother caressingly on the shoulder in passing.
A lock of Mrs. Ferrier's dark hair had fallen from the comb, and was hanging down her back. Annette paused to fasten it up, and, as she did so, caught quickly a pair of scissors near, and severed a little tress.
“What in the world are you cutting my hair for?” exclaimed Mrs. Ferrier, who had witnessed the operation in a looking-glass opposite.
Annette laughed and blushed. She had not meant to be detected. “I'll tell you when I come back, mamma. You shall see what I am going to have made. It will be something very wonderful.”
She turned quickly away, and bit her lip hard to keep down some rising emotion. She had seen a single thread of silver in that dark-brown tress, and the sight, touching at all times—the mother's first gray hair—brought with it the poignant thought that white hairs would come fast and thick when her mother should know what this journey meant.
“What are you taking all those common dresses for?” Mrs. Ferrier asked. “They are hardly fit to go to the mountains with.”
“Oh! we do not mean to be gay and fashionable,” was the light reply. “We want to have a quiet time by ourselves.”
“But you have got your jewel-case,” the mother persisted. “I don't see what you want of diamonds with a shabby black silk gown.”
In spite of the almost intolerable thought that after these few hours she would probably never see her mother again, Annette found this oversight irritating. Yet not for anything would she have spoken one word that was not dictated by respect and affection. The only way was to escape now, and make her preparations afterward, and for that she had an excuse.
“By the way, mamma,” she said, “I want to see F. Chevreuse, and this is just the hour to catch him at home. Won't you take your drive now, and leave me at his house? Wouldn't you just as lief go out before lunch as after? You and I haven't had a drive together for a long time.”
And then, when she was alone, she made haste to put into her trunks all those common, useful articles which fitted her present needs, and the few souvenirs too dear to leave behind, and the valuables, which might some day be [pg 251] sold, if money should fail them. She had scarcely turned the key on them, when her mother came in again, pulling on her gloves. “I want to speak to F. Chevreuse myself,” she remarked, “and I will go in with you.”
Annette said nothing, but dressed herself hastily. It really seemed as though every obstacle were being placed in her way; yet how could she be impatient with her poor mother, whose heart was so soon to be smitten, through her, by a terrible grief, and who would soon recall in bitterness of soul every word and act of this their last day together? And, after all, she had no desire to talk with the priest. What could she say to him? All that was necessary was written, and she could not ask his blessing nor any service from him, nor even his forgiveness. The one thing he could do for them was to denounce them, set the officers of justice on their track, and make their lot worse than that of Cain, since the earth was no longer wide and wild, but close and full of watching eyes and prating tongues. The world seemed to her, indeed, oppressively small, having no least nook where the restless, curious traveller did not penetrate with his merciless pen, for ever ready to sketch all he heard and saw to gratify the equally restless and curious people at home.
“Is it a confession you have to make?” Mrs Ferrier asked, as they approached the priest's house.
They had been driving along in silence, and at this question Annette started and blushed violently. “Dear me, mamma!” she said, in answer to her mother's look of astonishment, “I was off a thousand miles, and you gave me such a start when you spoke. Yes, it is a confession. You can see F. Chevreuse first, and I will go in after. You need not wait for me. I am going to walk out to the convent to Sister Cecilia a few minutes. The walk will do me good; and afterward I would like to have you send the carriage there for me.”
The excitement under which she was laboring led her unconsciously to assume a decided and almost commanding tone, and her mother submitted without any opposition. Annette certainly did not look well, she thought; and, besides, she was going away. This last consideration was one of great weight with Mrs. Ferrier, for she looked on railroads and steam-boats as infernal contrivances expressly intended to destroy human life, and never saw persons in whom she was interested commit themselves to the mercies of these inventions without entertaining mournful apprehensions as to the probable result. Moreover, Annette had been very sweet and fond with her all day, and was looking very beautiful, with that wide-awake glance of her bright eyes, and the crimson color flickering like a flame in her cheeks.
“I think, dear, on the whole, I won't go in to-day,” she said. “It might take too long; for this is his busy time of day. To-morrow will do as well.”
Annette only nodded, unable to speak; but in stepping from the carriage, she laid her small hand on Mrs. Ferrier's, and gave it a gentle pressure.
“That girl grows prettier and sweeter every day,” said the mother to herself, as her daughter disappeared within the doorway. “And how black velvet does become her!”
Father Chevreuse knew well that no ordinary errand could have brought Annette Gerald to his house, and it was impossible for him to meet her with the ordinary forms of civility. Scarcely any greeting passed between them, as he rose hastily at her entrance, and waited for her first word. She was, perhaps, more collected than he.
“Are you quite alone here?” she asked.
He led her to the inner sitting-room, and closed the door after them, and even then did not think to offer her a chair any more than she thought of taking one.
“We have told mamma that we are going away this evening for a little journey, and she expects us to return in four weeks. John knows all about our affairs. At the end of four weeks, he will say something to you, or you to him, whichever you please, and at that time you will open and use this packet.” She gave him an envelope carefully sealed, with the date at which it was to be opened written on the outside. “If anything should happen to you in the meantime, some one else must open it; but care must be used not to have it read before the time.” She paused for an answer.
“You need not fear,” the priest said, taking the packet and looking it over. He thought a moment. “I will write also on this that, in the event of my death, it is to be opened by F. O'Donovan or by the bishop of the diocese.”
He went to a table, wrote the directions, and then gave them to Annette to read.
“It is a private paper of mine,” she said, after reading and giving it back; “and I have the right to say when it shall be read. I give it into your hands only on the condition that my directions shall be complied with.”
He bowed, understanding perfectly that the words were intended as a future shield for him.
“At the same time, you will open this also, which is yours,” she added, and gave him a paper roll sealed and tied, but without any direction.
F. Chevreuse shrank a little, took the roll, then let it drop from his trembling hand. The cold and business-like manner of his visitor and his sympathy for her had kept his thoughts fixed on her; but here was something which brought his mother's image up before him with a terrible distinctness. It was impossible for him not to know that this little package was what she had died in trying to save. Tears blinded his eyes. The last evening he had spent with her came back like a vision; he saw her face, heard her voice, saw her kneeling before him for his blessing.
Making an effort to control and hide his emotion, he stooped to take up the package he had dropped; and when he looked up again, his visitor had left the room, and was walking quickly to the street door. For one moment he stood irresolute; then he hurried after her. But she had already gone out, and either did not or would not hear him call her back.
The sight of her going away so, wrung all thought of selfish grief out of his mind. He went back into the room, and watched her as she walked swiftly up the street. So innocent, so generous, so brave as she was, yet of all the sufferers by this miserable tragedy, with one exception, the most unhappy! The grief that must fall upon the mother of the guilty one no one could [pg 253] fathom; but the mother of a criminal can never hold herself surely innocent of his crimes, since a greater holiness in her own life, a wiser care in his training, and a more constant prayerfulness in his behalf might have saved him; but the young wife was, of all people in the world, the most innocent and the most wronged.
How light and graceful her step was. Who would not think that it betokened a light heart? She met an acquaintance, and stopped for a word of greeting, and the friend came along afterward smiling, as though at some merry jest. Passing the house of another friend, she nodded and kissed her hand to a child in the window, with how bright a face the priest, who had seen her self-control, could well guess.
“Is there nothing I can do, nothing I can say, to help her?” he asked himself, turning away from the window. “It is cruel that one so young should bear alone such a burden! What can I do? What can I do?”
He searched in vain for some means of help. There was none. For what she should do her own wit or the advice of others must suffice; and for words of comfort, they were not for him to speak to her. Her manner had shown clearly the distance which she felt must lie between them, and there was no way but for him to accept that position. He could pray, and that was all.
By the time he had come to this conclusion, Annette Gerald had reached the convent, and was greeting Sister Cecilia.
“I have only two words to say to you, dear Sister,” she said, “and those may seem very childish, but are not so in reality. Lawrence and I are going to make a little journey, which may last about four weeks, and poor mamma will be lonely. Besides that, she will worry. She hates to have me go away from her. Will not you be very kind to her, if she should come to you? Oh! I know you always are that; but recollect, when you see her, that I am really all she has. A son does not count for much, you know, especially when he is a young man. Very few young men are much comfort to their mothers, I think. Tell F. Chevreuse the very first time you see him that I said this to you, but don't tell any one else. And now, dear Sister, I have but a little time, for we start this evening. If there is no one in the chapel, I would like to go in a while. People have got so in the habit of wandering into the Immaculate, and looking about carelessly, that it is no longer pleasant to go there.”
The same air, as of a person gentle, indeed, but not to be detained nor trifled with, which had impressed F. Chevreuse in his visitor, was felt by the Sister also. She rose at once, saying that there was no one in the chapel, and would not be for some time, all the Sisters being engaged, unless Anita should go in.
“Anita has not been well?” Mrs. Gerald remarked with absent courtesy.
“No; she has not been the same since that terrible trial,” the nun sighed.
Annette Gerald's face lost its absent expression, and took a somewhat haughty and unsympathizing look. “Is that all?” she inquired in a tone of surprise.
“But, you know,” expostulated the Sister, “Anita's testimony was of the greatest importance. Besides, [pg 254] the scene was a most painful one for her to be dragged into. She is such a tender, sensitive creature.”
Annette had paused just inside the parlor-door, and she had evidently no mind to let the subject drop indifferently.
“My dear Sister,” she said with decision, “I am truly sorry for your sweet little Anita; but I think it wrong to foster the idea that there are certain sensitive souls in the world who must be pitied if a breath blows on them, while others are supposed to be able to bear the hurricane without being hurt. A great deal of this shrinking delicacy comes from a selfish watching of one's own sensations, and forgetting those of others, and a great deal from being pampered by others. You remember, perhaps, an old myth, which I have half forgotten, of a Camilla who was fastened to a lance and shot across a stream. She was a woman soft and weak, perhaps, but she had to go. Now, in this world there is many a woman who has all the miserable sensitiveness and delicacy of her kind, but with that there is also a will, or an unselfishness, or a necessity which transfixes her like a spear, and carries her through all sorts of difficulties.” For one instant a flash of some passion, either of anger, impatience, or pain, or of all mingled, shot into the speaker's face, and seemed to thrill through all her nerves. “Oh! it is true in this world also,” she exclaimed, “that unto him that hath shall be given. The happy must be shielded from pain, and those who cry out at the prick of a pin must be tenderly handled; but the miserable may have yet more misery heaped on them, and the patient find no mercy.”
“My dear lady!” expostulated Sister Cecilia, when the other paused, quivering with excitement.
“Oh! I do not mean to speak harshly of your sweet little Anita,” interrupted Mrs. Gerald, recovering herself; “I was only reminded of others, that is all. But even to her I would recommend thinking more of the sufferings of others and less of her own.”
“It is precisely that which hurts her,” replied the Sister, a little displeased. “She thinks of the sufferings of others, and, fancying that she has caused them, breaks her heart about it.”
Annette made a motion to go, and had an air of thinking very slightingly of the young novice's troubles. “She merely did her duty, and has no responsibility whatever,” she said. “The child needs to be scolded, and set about some hard, wholesome work. It would do her good to work in the garden, and spend a good deal of time in the open air. A person who has been taken possession of by some morbid idea should never be shut up in a house.”
Sister Cecilia suffered her visitor to pass on without saying another word. She was surprised and deeply hurt at the little sympathy shown their household flower and pet, yet she could not but perceive that, in a general way, much that had been said was quite true.
Passing by the chapel-door shortly after, she saw Annette Gerald on her knees before the altar, with her head bowed forward and hidden in her hands. Half an hour afterwards, when Mrs. Ferrier's carriage came, she was still in the same position, and had to be spoken to twice before she was roused. Then she started and looked up in alarm.
“Your carriage has come,” whispered the Sister, and looked quickly away from the face turned toward her, it was so white and worn. In that half-hour she seemed to have grown ten years older.
“Must I go now?” she exclaimed, with an air of terror, and for a moment seemed not to know where she was. Then murmuring an excuse, she recalled herself, and, by some magic, threw off again the look of age and pain. “You need not call Sister Cecilia, only say good-by to her for me,” she said. “I have really not a moment to spare.”
This Sister was almost a stranger to Mrs. Annette Gerald, and was quite taken by surprise when the lady turned at the door, and, without a word of farewell, kissed her, and then hurried away.
“Drive to the office, John, for Mr. Gerald,” she said; and no one would have suspected from her manner that she trembled before the man to whom she gave that careless order.
Lawrence came running lightly down the stairs, having been on the watch for his wife, and John, holding the carriage-door open, winked with astonishment at sight of the bright greeting exchanged between the two. He could maintain a cold and stolid reserve, if he had anything to conceal; but this airy gayety on the brink of ruin was not only beyond his power, but beyond his comprehension.
Stealing a glance of scrutiny into the young man's face, he met a glance of defiant hauteur. “You need not go any further with us, John,” Lawrence said. “We shall not need you. Jack, drive round to Mrs. Gerald's.”
And John, with his coat down to his heels—a costume in which nothing would have induced him voluntarily to take a promenade—was forced to walk home, comforting himself with the assurance that it was the last order he should have to obey from that source. Perhaps, indeed, he would not have obeyed it now, had they not driven away and left him no choice.
The sun was declining toward the west, and touching everything with the tender glory of early spring, when they drew up at the cottage gate, the sound of their wheels bringing Mrs. Gerald and Honora to the window, and then to the door.
“We can't stop to come in, Mamma Gerald,” Annette called out. “We are going off on a little visit, and only come to say good-by. Isn't it beautiful this afternoon? The trees will soon begin to bud, if this weather continues.”
The two ladies came out to the carriage, and Mrs. Gerald caught sight of her son's face, which had been turned away. It had grown suddenly white. She exclaimed: “Why, Lawrence! what is the matter?”
“Oh! another of those faint turns,” interposed his wife quickly, laying her hand on his arm. “He has no appetite, and is really fainting from lack of nourishment. The journey will do him good, mamma. We are going entirely on his account.”
“Oh! yes, it's nothing but a turn that will soon pass away,” he added, and seemed, indeed, already better.
“Do come in and take something warm,” his mother said anxiously, her beautiful blue eyes fixed on his face. “There is some chocolate just made.”
“We have no time,” Annette began; but her husband immediately opened the carriage-door.
“Yes, mother,” he said. “I won't keep you waiting but a minute, Ninon.”
The mother put her hand in his arm, and still turned her anxious face toward him. “You mustn't go to-night, if you feel sick, my son,” she said. “You know what happened to you before.”
“But the journey is just what I need, mother,” he answered, trying to speak cheerfully. “Of course I won't go if I feel unwell; but this is really nothing. I have not quite got my strength up, and, as Annette says, I have eaten nothing to-day.”
Those little services of a mother, how tender and touching they are at any time! how terrible in their pathos when we know that they will soon be at an end for us for ever! How the hand trembles to take the cup, and the lip trembles to touch its brim, when we know that she would have filled it with her life-blood, if that could have been saving to us!
“Sit here by the fire, dear, while I get your chocolate,” Mrs. Gerald said, and pushed the chair close to the hearth. “There is really quite a chill in the air.”
She stirred the fire, and made the red coals glow warmly, then went out of the room.
He looked round after her the moment her back was turned, and watched her hastening through the entry. The temptation was strong to follow her, throw himself at her feet, and tell her all. He started up from the chair, and took a step, but came back again. It would kill her, and he could not see her die. He would let her live yet the four weeks left her. Perhaps she might die a natural death before that. He hoped she would. At that thought, a sudden flame of hope and of trust in God rose in his heart. He dropped on his knees. “O my God! take my mother home before she hears of this, and I will do any penance, bear anything!” he prayed, with vehement rapidity. “Be merciful to her, and take her!”
He heard her step returning, and hastily resumed his seat, and bent forward to the fire.
“You look better already,” she said, smiling. “You have a little color now. Here is your chocolate, and Annette is calling to you to make haste.”
She held the little tray for him, and he managed, strengthened by that desperate hope of his, to empty the cup, and even smile faintly in giving it back. And then he got up, put his arm around his mother's waist, in a boyish fashion he had sometimes with her, and went out to the door with her so. And there he kissed her, and jumped into the carriage, and was driven away. It never occurred to her, so sweetly obedient had he been to her requests, and so expressive had his looks and actions been, that he had not uttered a word while he was in the house nor when he drove away. He had accepted her little services with affection and gratitude, and he had been tender and caressing, and that was enough. Moreover, he had really looked better on leaving, which proved that her prescription had done him good.
How Annette Gerald got away from home she could not have told afterward. Her trunks were sent in advance, and she and her husband chose to walk to the station in the evening. Some way she succeeded in answering all her mother's charges and anxious forebodings. She promised to sit in a middle car, so as to be at the furthest point from a collision in front or rear, [pg 257] and to have the life-preservers all ready at hand in the steamer. She took the basket of luncheon her mother put up, and allowed her bonnet to be tied for her and her shawl pinned. And at last they were in the portico, and it was necessary to say good-by.
“My poor mamma! don't be too anxious about me, whatever happens,” Annette said. “Remember God takes care of us all. I hope he will take care of you. Whenever you feel disposed to worry about us, say a little prayer, and all will come right again.”
The darkness hid the tears that rolled down her cheeks as she ended, and in a few minutes all was over, and the two were walking arm-in-arm down the quiet street.
“This way!” Lawrence said when they came to the street where his mother lived.
It was out of their way, but they went down by the house, and paused in front of it. The windows of the sitting-room were brightly lighted, and they could see by the glow of the lamp that it stood on a table drawn before the fire. As they looked, a shadow leaned forward on the white curtain. Mrs. Gerald was leaning with her elbow on the table, and talking to some one. They saw the slender hand that supported her chin, and the coil of her heavy hair. They saw the slight movement with which she pushed back a lock of hair that had a way of falling on to her forehead.
Annette felt the arm she held tremble. She only pressed it the closer, that he might not forget that love still was near him, but did not speak. There was nothing for her to say.
“Let's go inside the gate to the window,” he whispered. “Perhaps I can hear her speak.”
She softly opened the gate, and entered with him. The moonless night was slightly overclouded, and the shadows of the trees hid them perfectly, as they stole close to the window like two thieves. Lawrence pressed his face to the sash, and listened breathlessly. There was a low murmur of voices inside, then a few words distinctly spoken. “And by the way, dear, I forgot to close the blinds. Oh! no, I will close them. Don't rise!”
Mrs. Gerald came to the window, opened it, and leaned out so close to her son that he heard the rustle of her dress and fancied that he felt her breath on his cheek. She was silent a moment, looking up at the sky. “The night is very soft and mild,” she said. “Those children will have a pleasant journey.” One instant longer she rested there, her hand half extended to the blind, then she sent upward a word of prayer, which brushed her son's cheek in passing. “O God! protect my son!” she said.
Then the blinds were drawn together, and the son was shut out from her sight and sound for ever.
“It is our signal to go,” Annette whispered to her husband. “Come! We have no time to lose.”
He held her by the arm a moment.
“Isn't it better, after all, to stay and have it out here?” he asked desperately. “I'd rather face danger than fly from it. Running away makes me seem worse than I am.”
“You have no longer the right to consider yourself,” she answered, with a certain sternness. “I will not submit to have a convict for a husband. I would rather see you dead. And your mother shall not visit you in a felon's cell. Besides, no one is to be profited by such a [pg 258] piece of folly, and you would yourself repent it when too late. Come!”
He said no more, but suffered himself to be drawn away. He could not complain that his wife treated his heroic impulses with a disrespect amounting almost to contempt, for he could not himself trust them.
After having closed the window, Mrs. Gerald returned to her place by the fire. A round table was drawn up there between two armchairs, in one of which Miss Pembroke sat, knitting a scarf of crimson wool. The shade over the lamp kept its strong light from her eyes, and threw a faint shadow on the upper part of her face; but her sweet and serious mouth, and the round chin, with its faint dent of a dimple, were illuminated, her brown dress had rich yellow lights on the folds, and the end of a straying curl on her shoulder almost sparkled with gold. Her eyes were downcast and fixed on her work, and crimson loop after loop dropped swiftly from the ivory needles scarcely whiter than her hands.
“As I was saying,” Mrs. Gerald resumed, “six months of the year they were to pass with Mrs. Ferrier have gone, and next fall they will have an establishment of their own. It will be better for both of them. I am sure Annette will make a good housekeeper. Besides, every married man should be the master of a house. It gives him a place in the world, and makes him feel his responsibilities and dignities more.”
“Yes, every one should have a home,” answered the young woman gravely. “It is a great safeguard.”
Mrs. Gerald leaned back in her chair, and gazed into the fire. There was a smile of contentment on her lips and an air of gentle pride in the carriage of her head. As she thought, or dreamed, she turned about the birth-day ring her son had given her, and, presently becoming aware of what she was doing, looked at it and smiled as if she were smiling in his face.
“I never before felt so well contented and satisfied with his situation,” she said, her happiness breaking into words. “His marriage has turned out well. They seem to be perfectly united, and Lawrence is really proud of his wife; and with reason. She is no more like what she was when I first knew her than a butterfly is like a grub. She has developed wonderfully.” She was silent a moment, then added: “I am very thankful.”
She drew a rosary from her pocket, and, leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed, began to whisper the prayers as the beads slipped through her fingers.
Miss Pembroke glanced at her, and smiled faintly. It was very pleasant to see this mother happy in her son, yet how trembling and precarious was her happiness! This woman's heart, which bruised itself in beating, was always ready to catch some fleeting glory on its springing tide; like the fountain, which holds the rainbow a moment among its chilly drops.
While one woman prayed, the other thought. She had often dwelt upon this subject of women's lives being wrecked from love of friend, husband, or child, and the sight of Mrs. Gerald had been to her a constant illustration of such a wreck. These thoughts had troubled her, for she was not one to judge hastily, and she did not know whether to pity or to blame so ruinous a devotion. Now again the question floated up, and with it the wish to decide once for all before [pg 259] life should thrust the problem on her, when she would be too confused to think rightly. She was like one who stands safe yet wistful on shore, looking off over troubled waters, and Mrs. Gerald and Annette seemed to her tossing far out on the waves. She even seemed to herself to have approached the brink so near that the salt tide had touched her feet, and to have drawn back only just in time.
Gradually, as her fair fingers wove the glowing web, a faint cloud came over her face, and, if it had been possible for her to frown, that deeper shadow between the brows might have been called a frown. Her thoughts were growing stern.
“Were we made upright, we women, only to bend like reeds to every wind?” she asked herself. “Can we not be gentle without being slavish, and kind and tender without pouring our hearts out like water? Cannot we reserve something to ourselves, even while giving all and even more than our friends deserve? Cannot we hold our peace and happiness so firmly in our own hands that no one shall have the power to destroy them?”
Each question as it came met with a prompt answer, and resolution followed swiftly: “Never will I suffer myself to be so enslaved by any affection as to lose my individuality and be merged and lost in another, or be made wretched by another, or to have my sense of justice and right confused by the desire to make excuses for one I love. Never will I suffer the name which I have kept stainless to be associated with the disgrace of another, and never will I leave the orderly and honorable ways of life, where I have walked so far, to follow any one into the by-ways, for any pretext. Each one is to save his own soul, and to help others only to a certain extent. I will keep my place!”
That resolute and almost haughty face seemed scarcely to be Honora Pembroke's; and she felt so surely that her expression would check and startle her companion that when she saw Mrs. Gerald drop the rosary from her fingers, and turn to speak to her, she quickly changed her position so as to hide her face a moment.
Mrs. Gerald's voice had changed while she prayed, and seemed weighted with a calm seriousness from her heavenly communion; and her first words jarred strangely with her young friend's thought.
“How uncalculating the saints were!” she said. “Our Lady was the only one, I think, who escaped personal contumely, and that was not because she risked nothing, but because God would not suffer contempt nor slander to touch her. He spared her no pang, save that of disgrace; yet she would have accepted that without a complaint. How tender he was of her! He gave her a nominal spouse to shield her motherhood; it was through her Son that her heart was pierced, and the grief of a mother is always sacred; and he gave her always loving and devoted women, who clustered about and made her little court. She was never alone. But she is an exception. The others were despised and maltreated, and they seemed to be perpetually throwing themselves away. I do not doubt that those saints who never suffered martyrdom nor persecution were still, in their day, laughed and mocked at by some more than they were honored by others. They never stopped to count the cost.”
Miss Pembroke felt at the first [pg 260] instant as though Mrs. Gerald must have read her thoughts, and her reply came like a retort. “It is true they did not count the costs,” she said; “but it was God whom they loved.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Gerald replied gently, “that was what I meant.”
She was too closely wrapped in contentment to perceive the coldness with which her companion spoke. It seemed to her that all her cares had floated away, and left only rest and sweetness behind. She no longer feared anything. There comes to every one some happy season in life, she thought; and hers had come.
When, the next day, she received a note from her son, which he had written from their first stopping-place, she was scarcely surprised, though it was an unusual attention.
It was but a hurried line, written with a pencil and posted in the station-house.
“My darling mother,” he wrote, “if you should find your violet-bed under the parlor window trampled, blame Larry for it. He saw his mother's shadow on the curtain when he was on his way to the station last night, and took a fancy to go nearer and peep through the window. But he didn't mean to do any harm then, nor at some other times, when he did enough indeed. Forgive him for everything.”
Mrs. Gerald immediately went out, letter in hand, to see what marks had been left of this nocturnal visit; and, sure enough, there, on the newly-turned mould, was the print of a boot—well she knew her son's neat foot—and, on the other side, a tiny and delicate track where Annette had stood! But not a leaf of the sprouting violets was crushed.
Miss Pembroke smiled to see the mother touch these tracks softly with her finger-tips, and glance about as if to assure herself that there was no danger of their being effaced.
“Such a freak of those children!” she said gaily. “Do you know what I am going to do, Honora? I mean to sow little pink quill daisies in those two foot-prints, and show them to Lawrence and Annette when they come back. It was a beautiful thought of them to come to the window, and it shall be commemorated in beauty. The ground is nearly warm enough here now for seeds. When they come back, the tracks will be green. I wish flowers would blossom in three weeks.”
Mrs. Ferrier also heard that day from the travellers.
“I have a particular reason for asking you to be very careful about my letters,” Annette wrote. “Don't let any one see or know of them. I will tell you why presently. We are very well. Write me a line as soon as you receive this, and direct to New York. We shall not stop there, but go right on out West, probably. And, by the way, if you should wish ever to hear from Mrs. Gerald's relations, seek in New York for a letter directed to Mrs. Julia Ward. Say nothing of this now. I will explain.”
“And why should I wish to hear from Mrs. Gerald's relations?” wondered Mrs. Ferrier. But she said nothing. The secret was safe with her.
Meanwhile, the travellers had lost no time on their way; and three days from their leaving Crichton, they were on the ocean. Every stateroom and cabin had been taken when “Mr. and Mrs. Ward” [pg 261] went to the office of the steamer; but the captain, seeing the lady in great distress on account of the sick friend she was crossing the ocean to see, kindly gave up his own stateroom to the travellers.
It was quite as well for him to do so, indeed; for the very day they started a storm started with them, and he was too faithful an officer to desert his post on deck. So all night long he watched, courageous and faithful, over the lives committed to his care, while underneath his two special guests lay helpless and miserable, counting his footsteps, as sleepless as he. The engine throbbed beside them, like a heavily-beating heart, the long waves lashed the deck, the wind sang and whistled through the ropes, the steamer creaked and groaned.
“I have brought bad luck to the ship, Annette,” said her husband. “If I were overboard, the storm would cease.”
“In the first place, my name is Julia,” was the answer from the lower berth. “In the next place, there is nothing mysterious in this storm; it is simply the equinoctial gale, which has been threatening for days. I knew we should have it. In the third place, your being overboard would make no difference whatever in the weather. Are you sick?”
Annette knew well that a little chilly breeze would best blow away her husband's vapors.
“I am sick of lying here,” he said impatiently. “The rain must be over, unless it is another flood. I wonder how it looks out?”
He drew aside the curtain, and opened the window. The rain had ceased, but the wind still blew, and a pale light was everywhere, shining up through the waves and down through the clouds. As the steamer rolled, Annette, lying in her lower berth, could see alternately the gray and tumbled clouds of air, and the gray and heaving sea, which was less like moving water than a ruined, quaking earth, so heavily it rose and fell.
Lawrence Gerald, closely wrapped in furs, knelt on the sofa, and looked out, humming a tune that seemed to be for ever on his lips since his wife had first sung it to him, so that she was sometimes half sorry for having suggested it to him. A few words broke out while she listened:
“For man never slept
In a different bed,
And to sleep, you must slumber
In just such a bed.”
His thoughts seemed to be so haunted by the image of that cold and peaceful slumber that his wife trembled for him. He had not the enduring strength to bear a long trial, but he had that fitful strength which prompts to desperate deeds.
“I can see cities built and destroyed yonder,” he said. “There are white towns between dark mountains, and little hamlets up in the crevices; they grow, and then they are swallowed up. It is like a great earthquake. When the world is destroyed, it will perhaps look like that, pale and ashy.”
“Suppose we should go up on deck, and see what it looks like,” said Annette suddenly, anticipating the wish she knew he would have expressed. “It will be a change after our three days' imprisonment, and we may think the stateroom a pleasant refuge when we come back.”
They escaped the crest of a wave that leaped over the rail after them, and reached the wet and slippery deck.
“We mustn't speak to the officers,” [pg 262] Annette whispered, seeing the captain near them.
He passed them by without notice, and they hurried on to the shelter of the smoke-pipe, where the heat had dried the planks; and here, holding by ropes, they could look over the rail and see the long streaks of pale blue, where the foam slid under the surface of the water; see the gigantic struggle of the sea, and how the brave ship pushed through it all straight toward her unseen port.
Nothing is so perfect a figure of life as a ship on the sea, and one can hardly behold it without moralizing.
“Suppose that this ship had a soul of its own, instead of being guided by the will of other beings,” said Annette; “and suppose that, finding itself in such a woful case, it should say, ‘I see no port, no pole-star, no sun, nor moon, and I doubt if I shall ever see them again. I may as well stop trying, and go down here.’ Wouldn't that be a pity for itself and for others?”
“But suppose, on the other hand,” returned her husband, “that the ship had got a deadly thrust from some unseen rock, and the water was running in, and it could never gain the port. What would be the use of its striving and straining for a few leagues further?”
“We know not where the haven of a soul is set,” said Annette, dropping the figure. “God knows, for he has set it, near or far; and it may be nearer than we think. It is scarcely worth while for a man to lose his soul by jumping overboard at ten o'clock, when he may save it, and be drowned too, at eleven.”
Lawrence drew back as a great wave rose before them. He had only been playing at death; the reality was quite another thing. Chilled and drenched with spray, they hurried down to their stateroom.
It was a weary journey. After the storm came head-winds, and after the head-winds a fog, through which they crept, ringing the fog-bell, and stopping now and then.
Mr. and Mrs. Ward did not appear once among the passengers, even when everybody crowded up to catch the first glimpse of Ireland, and they were the last to appear when the passengers prepared to land at Liverpool. They had been a fortnight from home, the storm having delayed them two days, and they knew not what might have happened in that time. A telegram might have sped under the waves in an hour while they toiled over them, and just at the moment of escape their flight might be intercepted.
To Be Continued.
Dante Gabriel Rosetti.[84]
It is not difficult to understand the title which has been bestowed upon Mr. Rosetti of the “Poets' Poet.” His volume is full of delicate rhythmical experiments—winding bouts of melody with subtle catches of silence interspersed—which alternately pique and satisfy. No brother of the craft could fail to obtain valuable hints from these studies. But Mr. Rosetti is no mere word-poiser; he is an artist in the highest sense of the word, whose canvas teems with a thousand nameless lights, which as they cross and disappear make all the difference between the real and the unreal.
During the two years or more that Mr. Rosetti's volume has been before the English-reading public on both sides of the Atlantic, it has been frequently reviewed. Perhaps the best justification of the present review is that, over and above purely literary merits, Mr. Rosetti has peculiar claims upon the interest of Catholic readers, to which we would draw attention.
We gather from the brief notice at the beginning of the volume that many of these poems were composed twenty years ago, yet, if we except the occasional appearance of a single poem in the pages of a magazine, Mr. Rosetti has published nothing before. We can hardly believe that even the barbarians of twenty years ago can have combined against his publishing, like Mr. Bazzard's friends in Edwin Drood, and so we must suppose that he was fain to wait for the severest of all criticisms—that passed by a middle-aged man upon the productions of his youth. And now, having altered something and burnt more—had he waited, he would have found old age more indulgent—he publishes the remnant, all of which, he tells us justly enough, is mature, for which his mature age is sponsor.
It would be far easier to estimate Mr. Rosetti's position as a poet had he written more. Nor is this precisely a truism; for one feels at once that what he has given us is most precisely and emphatically a selection. Every one of his poems, whatever else it may be, is at least a cunning piece of artist's work in this or that particular style, with a distinct flavor of its own and true to itself throughout. If you know, and care for, the old Scots ballad, you will at once appreciate the specimen he gives you. If you object to the coarseness which shades the tenderness of “Stratton Water,” your criticism is unlearned. As well complain of the peat flavor of a “Finnan haddie.”
Poets who sing because they must sing, who pour into trembling ears great heterogeneous floods of song, the reflection of their many moods, things beautiful and rather beautiful, and plain and very plain; all the thousand-and-one scraps which have something clever in them, or illustrate something, or with the composition of which something interesting, whether pleasant or painful, is associated—take, for instance, any chance volume of Wordsworth or Browning—may be in the long run our benefactors, but they have no claim upon the ready-money of thanks; they charm, perhaps, [pg 264] but they often also bore. If a man whose imagination has not been left out is bored by Mr. Rosetti's volume, it is time for him, according to the Turkish proverb, to put his trust in God—his wine is running to the lees, his roses wither. And this is true although the generations of poetic taste are so short-lived that almost before a man has reached the mezzo camino, and certainly before he has lost his sense of life's enjoyments, he is apt to find himself somewhat out of harmony with the poetry of the day. Mr. Rosetti is no prophet of a new theory of art or master of a new phrase-mint, but rather a merchant whose cargo tells a tale of every port at which he has touched.
It is natural to compare, even if only to contrast, any new poet with Mr. Tennyson, as the poet who has had more immediate, sensible influence than any other upon the taste of his day; and although there is a prejudice against comparisons, it is difficult to see how they can be avoided if one is to do something more than point and ejaculate. In the present case, there is at least sufficient resemblance to suggest comparison. Amongst living poets these two are pre-eminently artist-poets, who finish their work and hide well away all their literary shavings. They are almost the only living poets who never go on talking till they can find the right word, and who never stammer.
There is not a scrap of either of these poets that, for the refined work there is in it, it would not be a shame to burn. Again, they are like in this, that they have an intense sensuous appreciation of the medium which they use, which seems to belong rather to the art of the painter or the musician than to that of the poet. It would not be difficult to make a color-box of Mr. Tennyson's favorite words, literary formulas for cool grays and bits of scarlet. On the other hand, Mr. Rosetti's art is rather that of the musician than the painter; he produces his effects rather by subtle changes of manner than by the color of single words, although his choice in these too is exquisite. His modulations remind one of Crashaw's lines in “Music's Duel”:
“The lute's light genius now doth proudly rise,
Heaved on the surges of swoll'n rhapsodies.
Whose flourish, meteor-like, doth curl the air
With flash of high-born fancies; here and there
Dancing in lofty measures, and anon
Creeps on the soft touch of a tender tone,
Whose trembling murmurs, melting in wild airs,
Run to and fro, complaining his sweet cares.”
And so, having drifted into points of difference, we will continue. They are unlike because, although both affect the quaintnesses of mediæval art, the laureate has done little more than utilize, for poetic purposes, the antiquarian and art knowledge of a gentleman of the period with a turn that way. But Mr. Rosetti is a mediæval artist heart and soul; and, though it may not be literally true that he has no end beyond his art, he would certainly feel that he was doing evil that good might come of it if he sacrificed a point of art to any object whatsoever.
Mr. Tennyson's pictures of the middle-age, beautiful and lifelike as they are, are the less true for their somewhat formal flourish of antiquity, whereby they give themselves, as it were, a modern frame. Of course, Tennyson's knights are not modern gentlemen in the sense that Racine's Greeks are French courtiers, but anyhow they are the realized aspirations of modern gentlemen of culture and refinement, and measures of fashionable reaction against the spirit of the day.
I think the consciousness that he wants a loosely-fitting mediævalism, or, so to speak, the armor without [pg 265] any particular quality of man inside, makes Mr. Tennyson affect the hybrid mediævalism of the Round Table in preference to the genuine strain of the old chroniclers. His mail-clad knights always remind us somewhat of a common scene in a marine aquarium—a whelk-shell inspired with an energy not its own by the intrusion of a hermit-crab, who, having disposed of the original occupant, manipulates the shell at his pleasure.
It may be urged, with some justice, that a poet is no mere collector of old china and old lace. He gathers to himself of all precious things, to frame for his thought such vehicle as he wants; but he has no duties to his materials that they should be in keeping with one another or with themselves, provided they minister to his design. Yes, but it must be remembered that both these poets belong to a school which owes its success to the religious observance of such duties, even though self-imposed; and it must always remain true that the more a poet can afford to borrow wholes instead of parts or aspects, and these plead the poet's cause each in its own tongue, not his, the greater is his triumph. I am not indicating any failure on the part of Mr. Tennyson when I speak of his Arthurian poems as a splendid masque. He knows where his strength lies. He has chosen his legend as a man might choose an antique wine-cooler for his wine; but the liquor inside, though superlatively good, is not hippocras or metheglin, but port and sherry. On the other hand, if we turn to Mr. Rosetti's treatment of mediæval subjects, “Dante at Verona,” “Sister Helen,” “The Staff and Scrip,” we find that his mediæval figures live, indeed, with the intensest kind of life, but that that life, from its woof to its outermost fringe, is stained with the color of its own day and country. It is this union of purism and vitality which is Mr. Rosetti's distinguishing characteristic.
It is now time for us to examine some of Mr. Rosetti's poems in detail. “The Blessed Damozel,” the first poem in the volume, were it not for its title, would be perfect; but we confess that the ultra quaintness of the title is the one point in the mediæval dress which does not, to our mind, harmonize with the Catholicity of the subject.
The subject would be trite enough in many hands. A young man has lost his love, and dreams of her night and day, until at length the soul of his imagination pierces that heaven into which she has been received ten years ago:
“Her seemed she scarce had been a day
One of God's choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers,
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.”
With the calm, unhesitating realism of Fra Angelico, he paints his lady leaning out towards him “from the gold bar of heaven,” with stars in her hair and lilies in her hand; and the outline is so clear and firm, so free from the mist of modern sentimentalism, that the paroxysm of doubt which breaks in at the end of the fourth stanza, and which for a moment makes the radiant vision tremulous, is really wanted to remind us of the abyss which the imagination is spanning:
“It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on,
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is space begun;
So high that, looking downward thence,
You scarce might see the sun.”
“The tides of day and night” alternate far down in the abyss beneath her feet, where the earth is spinning about the sun “like a fretful midge.” If any one is tempted to doubt if the heavens of modern science, with their [pg 266] vast distances and harmonious order, are more poetical than the star-spangled cope upon which the Chaldean shepherds gazed, let him read this poem. The simple imagery with which Mr. Rosetti clothes the abysses of heaven seems, without destroying their immensity, to render them visible:
“From the fixed place of heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the world....”
Again:
“The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf.”
He sees that she is looking for him, and then she speaks, not to him, for she sees him not, but of him, of what their life in heaven will be when he has come—for he must come, she says. And again, as she talks of the life in heaven, it is Fra Angelico in words; lush meadow-grass, so soft to road-worn feet, and golden-fruited trees, and tender intercourse from which all the acerbities and conventionalities of life are banished; an atmosphere in which the freshness of morning and the peace of evening are woven into one eternal day, which, as he says elsewhere, “hours no more offend.” How thoroughly Dantesque in its homely sublimity is the conception of Our Lady and her handmaids at their weaving:
“Into the fine cloth, white like flame,
Weaving the golden thread
To fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.”
We hardly think that this poem of Mr. Rosetti's strikes a single false chord even to Catholic ears. The utmost that can be said is that the blessed soul is too absorbed by her longing for her earthly love. But then the heaven of theology is an assemblage of paradoxes which faith alone can knit together; and, in its entirety, wholly without the realm of art. In this poem we have one aspect of the life of the blessed, “securus quidem sibi sed nostri solicitus,” as S. Bernard says, presented to us most vividly in the only colors an artist's pencil can command—those of earthly love. But this love is serene and pure, and, despite its intensity, free from all pain and impatience. The passion is supplied by the refrain in the earthly lover's heart, as in his touching commentary upon the confidence of her “we two” will do thus and thus when he comes:
“Alas! we two, we two, thou sayst!
Yea, one wast thou with me
That once of old. But shall God lift
To endless unity
The soul whose likeness with thy soul
Was but its love for thee?”
Having ended her description of heaven's mysterious joys:
“She gazed and listened, and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild,
‘All this is when he comes.’ She ceased.
The light thrilled towards her filled
With angels in strong level flight.
Her eyes prayed and she smiled.”
But soon the smile fades away as the angelic convoy glides past, for he is not there—
“And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept (I heard her tears).”
If it be objected that this is too gross a violation of the state in which all tears are wiped away, I answer, first, that there are tears and tears; secondly, that if anthropomorphism is allowable in our realizations of God, à fortiori is it allowable in our realizations of those who, although they are raised above the estate of humanity, are still human. Again, even the angels of Christian art have a prescriptive right to tears, and is it not written, Isai. xxxiii. 7, “Angeli pacis amarè flebunt?”
And now we will say what we have to say of perhaps the most wonderful of all Mr. Rosetti's poems, which somehow, for more reasons than one, suggests itself as a pendant [pg 267] to “The Blessed Damozel.” He has called it “Jenny,” and Jenny is the name—neither French nor Greek will mend the matter—of a young prostitute. We freely confess that there are two or three lines in this poem which we heartily wish Mr. Rosetti had never written; but, take it as it stands, few will be disposed to deny that it is a very real sermon against lust, all the more impressive because it is indirect. The story, such as it is, is this: A man, young but not in his first youth, who has been for some years settling down to a student's life, throws his work aside one evening, and goes off to one of his old haunts. Having spent half the night in dancing, and being smitten with Jenny's youthful beauty, he goes home with her. She, poor thing, utterly tired, falls dead asleep at supper, and he, watching her, falls to moralizing, half cynically, half tenderly, upon innocence and lust and destiny, until at last the pity of it all wholly possesses him and kills every other thought. And so musing till early dawn, till
“Now without, as if some word
Had called upon them that they heard,
The London sparrows far and nigh
Clamor together suddenly,”
he slips some gold pieces into her hair, and goes with the half-expressed hope that, as God has been merciful to him, so he will be merciful to her also.
What first touches him is her evident longing for rest:
“Glad from the crush to rest within,
From the heart-sickness and the din,
Where envy's voice at virtue's pitch
Mocks you because your gown is rich,
And from the pale girl's dumb rebuke,
Whose ill-clad grace and toil-worn look
Proclaim the strength that keeps her weak
And other nights than yours bespeak,
And from the wise, unchildish elf,
To schoolmate lesser than himself
Pointing you out what thing you are.”
The girl herself, beyond her youth and beauty, is nowise better than her fellows, and so she individualizes a larger pathos, and is in some sense a more touching representative of the victims of man's lust—
“Poor handful of bright spring water
Flung in the whirlpool's shrieking face.”
He is penetrated by the contrast between the fate of this poor girl and that of his cousin, just such another girl in natural disposition—
“And fond of dress, and change, and praise,
So mere a woman in her ways”;
but in the guarded atmosphere of her home, with every point in her character blooming into good.
“So pure—so fallen! how dare to think
Of the first common kindred link?
Yet Jenny, till the world shall burn,
It seems that all things take their turn,
And who shall say but this fair tree
May need, in changes that shall be,
Your children's children's charity?
Scorned then, no doubt, as you are scorned,
Shall no man hold his pride forewarned
Till in the end, the day of days,
At judgment, one of his own race,
As frail and lost as you, shall rise,
His daughter with his mother's eyes?”
Many a man would be fain to listen to such a sermon who would reject any other. For the preacher is no missionary in disguise, but a fellow-sinner converted in the presence of his sin, if we may call it conversion; at least, beaten down and overwhelmed by the colossal horror and pity of it, as a wild beast is tamed by a prairie-fire.
Many beautiful things have been said by non-Catholic poets of Our Blessed Lady. Indeed, a very pretty book might be made of these Gentile testimonies, from Milton, Cowley, Crashaw (before his conversion), Wordsworth, Keble, and many others. It would seem that Parnassus is as one of the high places of Baal, where the Spirit of the Lord rushes upon the poet, whose eyes are opened and he must needs bless her whom he that blesseth “shall also himself be blessed, and he that curseth shall be reckoned accursed,” and he cries, [pg 268] “How beautiful are thy tabernacles,” O Mary, Mother of God, “as woody valleys, as watered gardens near the rivers, as tabernacles which the Lord has pitched as cedars by the water-side.” But with Mr. Rosetti it is something more than this. One is tempted to fancy that with his Italian name he must have really inherited an Italian's devotion to the Madonna. His poem “Ave” is neither more nor less than a meditation upon the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of Our Lady's life, and it breathes a devotion as tender and sensitive—in a word, as Catholic—as though it had been written by F. Faber. We shall venture to transfer the whole of it to our pages, for we cannot otherwise justify what we have said, and part of its specific beauty is that it is in one breath:
Ave.
Mother of fair delight,
Thou handmaid perfect in God's sight,
Now sitting fourth beside the Three,
Thyself a woman Trinity,
Being a daughter born to God,
Mother of Christ from stall to Rood,
And wife unto the Holy Ghost:—
Oh! when our need is uttermost,
Think that to such as death may strike
Thou wert a sister, sisterlike!
Thou head-stone of humanity,
Ground-stone of the great mystery,
Fashioned like us, yet more than we!
Mind'st thou not (when June's heavy breath
Warmed the long days in Nazareth)
That eve thou didst go forth to give
Thy flowers some drink that they might live
One faint night more amid the sands,
Far off the trees were as pale wands
Against the fervid sky; the sea
Sighed further off eternally
As human sorrow sighs in sleep.
Then suddenly the awe grew deep,
As of a day to which all days
Were footsteps in God's secret ways:
Until a folding sense like prayer
Which is, as God is, everywhere,
Gathered about thee; and a voice
Spake to thee without any noise.
Being of the silence: “Hail,” it said,
“Thou that art highly favorèd;
The Lord is with thee here and now;
Blessed among all women thou.”
Ah! Knew'st thou of the end, when first
That Babe was on thy bosom nursed?
Or when he tottered round thy knee
Did thy great sorrow dawn on thee—
And through his boyhood year by year
Eating with him the Passover,
Didst thou discern confusedly
That holier Sacrament, when He,
The bitter cup about to quaff,
Should break the bread and eat thereof?
Or came not yet the knowledge, even
Till on some day forecast in Heaven
His feet passed through thy door to press
Upon his Father's business?—
Or still was God's high secret kept?
Nay, but I think the whisper crept
Like growth through childhood. Work and play,
Things common to the course of day,
Awed thee with meanings unfulfill'd,
And all through girlhood, something still'd
Thy senses like the birth of light,
When thou hast trimmed thy lamp at night
Or washed thy garments in the stream:
To whose white bed had come the dream
That He was thine and thou wert His
Who feeds among the field-lilies.
O solemn shadow of the end,
In that wise spirit long contain'd!
O awful end! and those unsaid
Long years when it was Finished!
Mind'st thou not (when the twilight gone
Left darkness in the house of John)
Between the naked window-bars
That spacious vigil of the stars?
For thou, a watcher even as they,
Wouldst rise from where throughout the day
Thou wroughtest raiment for his poor;
And, finding the fixed terms endure
Of day and night which never brought
Sounds of his coming chariot,
Wouldst lift through cloud-waste unexplor'd
Those eyes which said “How long, O Lord”?
Then that disciple whom he loved,
Well heeding, haply would be moved
To ask thy blessing in his name;
And that one thought in both, the same
Though silent, then would clasp ye round
To weep together—tears long bound,
Sick tears of patience, dumb and slow.
Yet, “Surely I come quickly,” so
He said, from life and death gone home.
Amen: even so, Lord Jesus come!
But oh! what human tongue can speak
That day when death was sent to break
From the tired spirit like a veil,
Its covenant with Gabriel
Endured at length unto the end?
What human thought can apprehend
That mystery of motherhood
When thy Beloved at length renew'd
The sweet communion severèd—
His left hand underneath thine head
And his right hand embracing thee?
Lo! He was thine, and this is He!
Soul, is it Faith, or Love, or Hope,
That lets me see her standing up
Where the light of the Throne is bright?
Unto the left, unto the right,
The cherubim, arrayed, conjoint,
Float inward to a golden point,
And from between the seraphim
The glory issues for a hymn.
O Mary Mother! be not loth
To listen—thou whom the stars clothe,
Who seest and mayst not be seen
Hear us at last, O Mary Queen!
Into our shadow bend thy face,
Bowing thee from the secret place,
O Mary Virgin, full of grace!
Mr. Rosetti certainly does not affect classical subjects. There is nothing in his curious Treasury at all corresponding to those most exquisite of all Mr. Tennyson's poems, “Ulysses” and “Tithonus.” In the few instances in which he does handle classical legend, it is always its quaint reflection in the mediæval mind that attracts him, as in “Troy Town,” but he is at home everywhere. “Eden Bower” and “Sister Helen” are like and unlike enough for comparison. They are both monologues of deadly sin; the first is spite, the second hate, set to music. The conception of Lilith in “Eden Bower” is a monstrous waif of rabbinical tradition. She is a sort of woman-snake, supposed to have been Adam's first wife before the creation of Eve, and in her jealousy of the wife who supplanted her is found the origin of her conspiracy with the king-snake of Eden which brings about the Fall. The poem is one prolonged musical but most diabolical chuckle of Lilith over the immortal mischief she is about to perpetrate. She is indeed all the while coaxing the serpent to help her, but her tone throughout is one of assured triumph. The woman and the fiend are interwoven with marvellous subtlety—a fiend's colossal blasphemy and a woman's petty spite. The fiend does not shrink from declaring open war against heaven.
“Strong is God, the fell foe of Lilith
(And O the bower and the hour!)—
Naught in heaven or earth may affright him,
But join thou with me and we will smite him.”
The woman thus in anticipation stabs her rival with her husband's cowardice.
“Hear, thou Eve, the man's heart in Adam
(And O the bower and the hour!)—
Of his brave words hark to the bravest,
This the woman gave that thou gavest.”
How she wriggles and gasps and hugs herself at the thought of the woe she is to bring upon her victims, gloating over every detail of their desolate exile, and forecasting the death of one son and the damnation of another. Lilith after all is a fiend, and, as a creation of art, a fiend is a creature that lives and revels in wickedness as a salamander was supposed to inhabit fire, with a keen sense of pleasure and without moral responsibility; but in “Sister Helen” we have something much more dreadful because more human—“Hate born of Love”—hate that has devoured all love, even love of self—the hatred that is despair. A ruined girl, dwelling in a lonely tower with her little brother, seeks vengeance upon her seducer after the mediæval manner, by consuming his waxen image before the fire. And now upon the third night she is nigh upon its achievement, for the wax is wasting fast. The child takes a child's interest in the little figure that was once so plump, but through which the flame is now shining red. He prattles about it, but understands nothing, nor yet that there is anything to understand. His sister coaxes him out into the balcony to look out and say what he sees, for she knows what must come. And one after the other the brothers and father of the dying man ride up in the wild night and implore her mercy, at first that she will save his life, and then that at least she will forgive and save him from his despair, that body and soul may not perish. There is something simply appalling in the way in which each entreaty, as it comes to her repeated by her little brother's voice, is slain by the calm, ruthless, sometimes ironical comment in which she conveys her refusal.
“ ‘He calls your name in his agony, Sister Helen,
That even dead love must weep to see.’
‘Hate born of Love is blind as he, Little brother!’
(O mother, Mary mother,
Love turned to hate, between hell and heaven!)
‘Oh! he prays you, as his heart would rive, Sister Helen,
To save his dear son's soul alive.’
‘Nay, flame cannot slay it, it shall thrive, Little brother!’
(O mother, Mary mother,
Alas, alas, between hell and heaven!)”
All entreaties are useless, the death-knell sounds, and the riders turn their horses—
“ ‘Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, Sister Helen?
Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?’
‘A soul that's lost, as mine is lost, Little brother!’
(O mother, Mary mother,
Lost, lost, all lost, between hell and heaven!)”
One is tempted to say of Mr. Rosetti as was said of his patron Dante, “Lo, he that strolls to hell and back at will.” We speak advisedly of his “patron Dante,” for his devotion to his great namesake is of the intensest kind. Almost the longest poem in the volume is “Dante at Verona,” in which every conceivable detail in the poet's painful exile at that court is dwelt upon with a solicitude that reminds one of an early Christian sponging up a martyr's blood. To appreciate the poem thoroughly, one ought to share with Mr. Rosetti in the intimacy of the great Florentine. There are, however, many exquisite bits of description in it that must come home to every one. Surely the Gran Cane's jester will live for ever:
“There was a jester, a foul lout
Whom the court loved for graceless arts;
Sworn scholiast of the bestial parts
Of speech; a ribald mouth to shout
In folly's horny tympanum
Such things as make the wise man dumb.
“Much loved, him Dante loathed; and so
One day when Dante felt perplex'd
If any day that could come next
Were worth the waiting for or no,
And mute he sat amid the din—
Can Grande called the jester in.
“Rank words with such are wit's best wealth.
Lords mouthed approval; ladies kept
Twittering with clustered heads, except
Some few that took their trains by stealth
And went. Can Grande shook his hair
And smote his thighs and laughed i' the air.
“Then facing on his guest, he cried:
‘Say, Messer Dante, how it is
I get out of a clown like this
More than your wisdom can provide?
And Dante: 'Tis man's ancient whim
That still his like seems good to him.’ ”
We cannot of course pretend to catalogue all Mr. Rosetti's beauties. But for the sake of quoting one stanza, we must say a word of the “Staff and Scrip.” A knight vowed to defend wronged innocence, finds himself, whilst returning from Palestine, in the land of a fair lady, which her triumphant foemen are ravaging, and where all hope of resistance is dead. He goes out on her behalf, and conquers and dies. This is the description of his return on the night of his victory:
“The first of all the rout was sound,
The next were dust and flame,
And then the horses shook the ground:
And in the thick of them
A still band came.”
Nearly a third of Mr. Rosetti's volume consists of sonnets. Now, a sonnet should be grave but not heavy. It must have a severity tempered by sweetness like the breviary character of the Venerable Bede. It must linger meditatively; it must not loiter, or fumble with its meaning. It must be sinuous, never headlong; feeling its rhymes delicately, not falling upon them; for these are less rhymes than the most prominent of many assonances, upon all of which the rhythm hangs. Indeed, the texture of the sonnet resembles more that of blank-verse than that of any other metre we possess. Without denying the perfection of some two or three of Milton's sonnets, and perhaps in a lesser degree of about as many of Wordsworth's, we may be permitted to say that among our sonnet-writers Milton, as a general rule, is too fierce and headlong, as Wordsworth says of him, in words of praise which to our ears suggest blame. In his hands, “the thing became a trumpet”; whilst [pg 271] Wordsworth has too poor a vocabulary for a composition in which every word ought to tell. Shakespeare's sonnets are only sonnets in name. They do not fall into two, or rather one and a half, like an acorn and its cup, but are simply short poems of three independent stanzas of alternate rhymes, the whole concluding with a rhyming couplet. The Elizabethan writers who used the genuine sonnet—Sidney, Spenser, Drummond, especially the last—attained, we cannot help thinking, to a more exquisite use of the sonnet than either Milton or Wordsworth, although the beauty of their sonnets is somewhat marred by the twanging effect of the concluding rhyming couplet to which they persistently cling. Many of Mr. Rosetti's sonnets strike us not only as beautiful poems, but as very finished specimens of the sonnet. He seems to have attained to the Italian delicacy of the best of the Elizabethan sonneteers, without loss of originality and force. He is, however, perhaps rather too fond of fretting the melody of his lines by a harsh emphasis, which, effective enough in a liquid medium like Italian, is rather trying to the naturally broken music of the English tongue. An example of this may be noted in the sixth line of the following very beautiful sonnet. He has called it “Inclusiveness”—a title with which we venture to quarrel, for the phenomenon described is not a quality of anything, but a fact or law; we would substitute, in spite of its technical flavor, “Introsusception.”
“The changing guests, each in a different mood
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in like wise
Is a soul's board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit'st in, dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of a life spent well;
And may be stamped a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”
Here is an exquisite vindication of one of the least popular of the condemnations in the Syllabus—that of non-intervention.
It is called “On the Refusal of Aid between Nations”:
“Not that the earth is changing, O my God!
Nor that the seasons totter in their walk,—
Not that the virulent ill of act and talk
Seethes ever as a wine-press ever trod,—
Not therefore are we certain that the rod
Weighs in thine hand to smite the world; though now
Beneath thine hand so many nations bow,
So many kings:—not therefore, O my God:—
But because man is parcelled out in men
Even thus; because, for any wrongful blow,
No one not stricken asks, ‘I would be told
Why thou dost strike’; but his heart whispers then,
‘He is he, I am I.’ By this we know
That the earth falls asunder, being old.”
Mr. Rosetti has adopted, as we have already indicated, more fully than a Catholic could approve, a principle which is obtaining a very dangerous prominence amongst the rising generation of English poets, that art is justified of her children—that to the artist all things are chaste. Thus inevitably there are some lines one could wish unwritten, and more that one would not have every one read. Yet for all this the ethos of the book is chaste and noble, nor do we know any poet by whom purity is more honestly appreciated and worshipped. The volume is a remarkable example of the extent to which a love of the Madonna and the ascetic inspiration of Dante can counteract and restrain the growing sensuousness of English poetry.
If Mr. Rosetti is sometimes obscure, it is not that his touch is ever otherwise than delicate and precise, but because his art is rather the art of the musician than of the painter. His changes of key, so to speak, are so [pg 272] swift and subtle, and the harmonies with which the theme is clothed are so manifold and so quaint, that his compositions have sometimes the difficulty of a sonata of Beethoven, and require considerable familiarity before their proportions can be grasped. Indeed, we must confess that there are passages the meaning of which we despair of ever grasping with any precision; we must be content to accept them as a sort of hieroglyphic, for splendor or purity, like the scroll and lily-work of a mediæval goldsmith. This is the more provoking, as obscurity is not here, as often in Mr. Browning's poems, covered by an oracular use of certain crabbed expressions, which at least indicate the nut that is to be cracked, but coexists with a diction consistently pure and flowing.
Although we have compared Mr. Rosetti's art to that of the musician rather than to that of the painter, we have been told that he is a painter of a high order. Anyhow, his fondness for painting is proved by the number of sonnets which he has made upon pictures, ancient and modern. We cannot more fitly conclude our review than with his sonnet, “For our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci”:
“Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The shadow of death? and is that outer sea
Infinite, imminent eternity?
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustain'd
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while he
Blesses the dead with his hand silently
To his long day which hours no more offend?
“Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult.”