“‘Hum thrice, and buzz as often.’”
CHAPTER VII.
A CHANGE OF PROSPECTS.—A NEW INSIGHT INTO THE CHARACTER OF THE HERO.—A CONFERENCE BETWEEN TWO BROTHERS.
A DAY or two after the conversation recorded in my last chapter, St. John, to my inexpressible regret, left us for London; however, we had enjoyed several conferences together during his stay, and when we parted it was with a pressing invitation on his side to visit him in London, and a most faithful promise on mine to avail myself of the request.
No sooner was he fairly gone than I went to seek my uncle; I found him reading one of Farquhar’s comedies. Despite my sorrow at interrupting him in so venerable a study, I was too full of my new plot to heed breaking off that in the comedy. In very few words I made the good knight understand that his descriptions had infected me, and that I was dying to ascertain their truth; in a word, that his hopeful nephew was fully bent on going to town. My uncle first stared, then swore, then paused, then looked at his leg, drew up his stocking, frowned, whistled, and told me at last to talk to him about it another time. Now, for my part, I think there are only two classes of people in the world authorized to put one off to “another time,”—prime ministers and creditors; accordingly, I would not take my uncle’s dismissal. I had not read plays, studied philosophy, and laid snares for the Abbe Montreuil without deriving some little wisdom from my experience; so I took to teasing, and a notable plan it is too! Whoever has pursued it may guess the result. My uncle yielded, and that day fortnight was fixed for my departure.
Oh! with what transport did I look forward to the completion of my wishes, the goal of my ambition! I hastened forth; I hurried into the woods; I sang out in the gladness of my heart, like a bird released; I drank in the air with a rapturous sympathy in its freedom; my step scarcely touched the earth, and my whole frame seemed ethereal, elated, exalted by the vivifying inspiration of my hopes. I paused by a little streamlet, which, brawling over stones and through unpenetrated thicknesses of wood, seemed, like confined ambition, not the less restless for its obscurity.
“Wild brooklet,” I cried, as my thoughts rushed into words, “fret on, our lot is no longer the same; your wanderings and your murmurs are wasted in solitude and shade; your voice dies and re-awakes, but without an echo; your waves spread around their path neither fertility nor terror; their anger is idle, and their freshness is lavished on a sterile soil; the sun shines in vain for you, through these unvarying wastes of silence and gloom; Fortune freights not your channel with her hoarded stores, and Pleasure ventures not her silken sails upon your tide; not even the solitary idler roves beside you, to consecrate with human fellowship your melancholy course; no shape of beauty bends over your turbid waters, or mirrors in your breast the loveliness that hallows earth. Lonely and sullen, through storm or sunshine, you repine along your desolate way, and only catch, through the matted boughs that darken over you, the beams of the wan stars, which, like human hopes, tremble upon your breast, and are broken, even before they fade, by the very turbulence of the surface on which they fall. Rove, repine, murmur on! Such was my fate, but the resemblance is no more. I shall no longer be a lonely and regretful being; my affections will no longer waste themselves upon barrenness and stone. I go among the living and warm world of mortal energies and desires; my existence shall glide alternately through crested cities, and bowers in which Poetry worships Love; and the clear depths of my heart shall reflect whatever its young dreams have shadowed forth, the visioned form, the gentle and fairy spirit, the Eve of my soul’s imagined and foreboded paradise.”
Venting, in this incoherent strain, the exultation which filled my thoughts, I wandered on, throughout the whole day, till my spirits had exhausted themselves by indulgence; and, wearied alike by mental excitement and bodily exertion, I turned, with slow steps, towards the house. As I ascended the gentle acclivity on which it stood, I saw a figure approaching towards me: the increasing shades of the evening did not allow me to recognize the shape until it was almost by my side; it was Aubrey.
Of late I had seen very little of him. His devotional studies and habits seemed to draw him from the idle pursuits of myself and my uncle’s guests; and Aubrey was one peculiarly susceptible of neglect, and sore, to morbidity, at the semblance of unkindness; so that he required to be sought, and rarely troubled others with advances: that night, however, his greeting was unusually warm.