When, accordingly, I saw on the counters of the trade the daintiest of volumes, hailing, too, from the United States, entitled Hannah More, [2] and perceived that it was a short biography and appreciation of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at last come. I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read, determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.
Miss Harland's preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to 'bound sermons and semi-detached tracts,' was enlivened by the Works of Hannah More. She proceeds as follows:
'At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the dear old home library.... The leaves of the book I held fell apart at The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.'
I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words made me:
'The usher took six hasty strides
As smit with sudden pain.'
I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding, their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.
Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of Charlotte Brontë's mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of Jane Eyre and Villette might have grown up more like Hannah More than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home library, I might have read The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain and The Search after Happiness of a Sunday, and found solace therein. But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with the Pilgrim's Progress, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained page of Mrs. Sherwood's Tales from the Church Catechism, and, 'more curious sport than that,' the Bible in Spain of the never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.
What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland's enthusiasm for Hannah More's writings is that it expires with the preface. There, indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:
'And The Search after Happiness! You cannot have forgotten all of the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals flung down by the warm wind.'
This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in The Search after Happiness, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head: