"Onward we went—but slack and slow;
His savage force at length o'erspent,
The drooping courser, faint and low,
All feebly foaming went.
A sickly infant had had power
To guide him forward in that hour;
But useless all to me:
His new-born tameness nought avail'd—
My limbs were bound; my force had fail'd,
Perchance, had they been free.
With feeble effort still I tried
To rend the bonds so starkly tied,
But still it was in vain;
My limbs were only wrung the more,
And soon the idle strife gave o'er,
Which but prolonged their pain:
The dizzy race seem'd almost done,
Although no goal was nearly won:
Rome streaks announced the coming sun—
How slow, alas! he came!
Methought that mist of dawning gray
Would never dapple into day;
How heavily it roll'd away—
Before the eastern flame
Rose crimson, and deposed the stars,
And call'd the radiance from their cars,
And fill'd the earth, from his deep throne.
"Up rose the sun; the mists were curl'd
Back from the solitary world
Which lay around, behind, before.
What booted it to traverse o'er
Plain, forest, river? Man nor brute,
Nor dint of hoof, nor print of foot,
Lay in the wild luxuriant soil;
No sign of travel, none of toil;
The very air was mute;
And not an insect's shrill small horn.
Nor matin bird's new voice was borne
From herb nor thicket. Many a werst,
Panting as if his heart would burst.
The weary brute still stagger'd on:
And still we were—or seem'd—alone.
At length, while reeling on our way.
Methought I heard a courser neigh,
From out yon tuft of blackening firs.
Is it the wind those branches stirs?
No, no! from out the forest prance
A trampling troop; I see them come!
In one vast squadron they advance!
I strove to cry—my lips were dumb.
The steeds rush on in plunging pride;
But where are they the reins to guide
A thousand horse, and none to ride!
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils never stretch'd by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit of rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarr'd by spur or rod,
A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o'er the sea,
Came thickly thundering on,
As if our faint approach to meet;
The sight re-nerved my courser's feet,
A moment staggering, feebly fleet,
A moment, with a faint low neigh,
He answer'd, and then fell;
With gasps and glaring eyes he lay,
And reeking limbs immoveable,
His first and last career is done!
On came the troop—they saw him stoop,
They saw me strangely bound along
His back with many a bloody thong:
They stop, they start, they snuff the air,
Gallop a moment here and there,
Approach, retire, wheel round and round,
Then plunging back with sudden bound,
Headed by one black mighty steed,
Who seem'd the patriarch of his breed,
Without a single speck or hair
Of white upon his shaggy hide;
They snort, they foam, neigh, swerve aside.
And backward to the forest fly,
By instinct, from a human eye.
They left me there to my despair,
Link'd to the dead and stiffening wretch,
Whose lifeless limbs beneath me stretch,
Believed from that unwonted weight,
From whence I could not extricate
Nor him nor me—and there we lay,
The dying on the dead!
I little deem'd another day
Would see my houseless, helpless head.
BYRON.
[Notes: Mazeppa (1645-1709) was at first in the service of the King of Poland, but on account of a charge brought against him suffered the penalty described in the poem. He afterwards joined the Cossacks and became their leader; was in favour for a time with Peter the Great; but finally joined Charles XII., and died soon after the battle of Pultowa (1709), in which Charles was defeated by Peter.
Ukraine ("a frontier"), a district lying on the borders of Poland and Russia.
Werst. A Russian measure of distance.]
* * * * *
JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.
We make our first introduction to Wedgwood about the year 1741, as the youngest of a family of thirteen children, and as put to earn his bread, at eleven years of age, in the trade of his father, and in the branch of a thrower. Then comes the well-known small-pox: the settling of the dregs of the disease in the lower part of the leg: and the amputation of the limb, rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable occasion to record our obligations to the small-pox. But, in the wonderful ways of Providence, that disease, which came to him as a two-fold scourge, was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him from growing up to the active vigorous English workman, possessed of all his limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; it put him upon considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something else, and something greater. It sent his mind inwards; it drove him to meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was, that he arrived at a perception and a grasp of them which might, perhaps, have been envied, certainly have been owned, by an Athenian potter. Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of King Numa, receiving in a cavern, from the Nymph Egeria, the laws that were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that illness and mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made for him a cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching, meditative, and fruitful mind.
From those early days of suffering, weary perhaps to him as they went by, but bright surely in the retrospect both to him and us, a mark seems at once to have been set upon his career. But those, who would dwell upon his history, have still to deplore that many of the materials are wanting. It is not creditable to his country or his art, that the Life of Wedgwood should still remain unwritten. Here is a man, who, in the well-chosen words of his epitaph, "converted a rude and inconsiderable manufacture into an elegant art, and an important branch of national commerce." Here is a man, who, beginning as it were from zero, and unaided by the national or royal gifts which were found necessary to uphold the glories of Sèvres, of Chelsea, and of Dresden, produced works truer, perhaps, to the inexorable laws of art, than the fine fabrics that proceeded from those establishments, and scarcely less attractive to the public taste. Here is a man, who found his business cooped up within a narrow valley by the want of even tolerable communications, and who, while he devoted his mind to the lifting that business from meanness, ugliness, and weakness, to the highest excellence of material and form, had surplus energy enough to take a leading part in great engineering works like the Grand Trunk Canal from the Mersey to the Trent; which made the raw material of his industry abundant and cheap, which supplied a vent for the manufactured article, and opened for it materially a way to the outer world. Lastly, here is a man who found his country dependent upon others for its supplies of all the finer earthenware; but who, by his single strength, reversed the inclination of the scales, and scattered thickly the productions of his factory over all the breadth of the continent of Europe. In travelling from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest point of Sweden, from Dunkirk to the southern extremity of France, one is served at every inn from English earthenware. The same article adorns the tables of Spain, Portugal, and Italy; it provides the cargoes of ships to the East Indies, the West Indies, and America.
Speech by MR. GLADSTONE.