From a Cornish Window / A New Edition

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land."

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land."

For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with good intentions. The mischief with them is their lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers will agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than to suppose yourself suddenly endowed with a million of money, and to invent modes of dispensing it for the good of your kind. As a past master of that game I offer the above suggestion gratis to those poor brothers of mine who have more money than they know how to use.

The railway—not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor—took me to pay a pious visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking— especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' on the evening before holidays—of a passage in Izaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton:—

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time—which I therefore thought slow-paced—had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time—which I therefore thought slow-paced—had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close; not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me—a small boy whom he had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter (I dare say) had forgotten.

"T. E. B."

Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St. Matthew's Church, and characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.

"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were associated with its history… 'The only church in Douglas where the poor go'—I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it will continue to be so.… I postulate the continuity.…"