* * * *
Enough for him if in his boldest word
The beating heart of man be faintly stirr’d.
That mournful music, that, like chords which sigh
Through charmed gardens, all who hear it die;
That solemn music he does not pursue,
To distant ages out of human view.
* * * *
But musing with a calm and steady gaze
Before the crackling flame of living days,
He hears it whisper, through the busy roar
Of what shall be, and what has been before.
Awake the Present! Shall no scene display
The tragic passion of the passing day?
Is it with man as with some meaner things,
That out of death his solemn purpose springs?
Can this eventful life no moral teach,
Unless he be for aye beyond its reach?
* * * *
Awake the Present! What the past has sown
Is in its harvest garner’d, reap’d, and grown.
How pride engenders pride, and wrong breeds wrong,
And truth and falsehood hand in hand along
High places walk in monster-like embrace,
The modern Janus with a double face;
How social usage hath the power to change
Good thought to evil in its highest range,
To cramp the noble soul, and turn to ruth
The kindling impulse of the glowing youth,
Crushing the spirit in its house of clay,—
Learn from the lesson of the present day.
Not light its import, and not poor its mien,
Yourselves the actors, and your home the scene.”
We now come to a very curious fact. Mr. R. H. Horne pointed out twenty-five years ago, [337] that a great portion of the scenes describing the death of Little Nell in the “Old Curiosity Shop,” will be found to be written—whether by design or harmonious accident, of which the author was not even subsequently fully conscious—in blank verse, of irregular metre and rhythms, which Southey, Shelley, and some other poets have occasionally adopted. The following passage, properly divided into lines, will stand thus:
NELLY’S FUNERAL.
“And now the bell—the bell
She had so often heard by night and day,
And listen’d to with solemn pleasure,
Almost as a living voice—
Rung its remorseless toll for her,
So young, so beautiful, so good.“Decrepit age, and vigorous life,
And blooming youth and helpless infancy,
Pour’d forth—on crutches, in the pride of strength
And health, in the full blush
Of promise, the mere dawn of life—
To gather round her tomb. Old men were there,
Whose eyes were dim
And senses failing—
Grandames, who might have died ten years ago,
And still been old—the deaf, the blind, the lame,
The palsied,
The living dead in many shapes and forms,
To see the closing of this early grave.
What was the death it would shut in,
To that which still could crawl and creep above it!“Along the crowded path they bore her now;
Pure as the new-fall’n snow
That cover’d it; whose day on earth
Had been as fleeting.
Under that porch, where she had sat when Heaven
In mercy brought her to that peaceful spot,
She pass’d again, and the old church
Received her in its quiet shade.”
Throughout the whole of the above, only two unimportant words have been omitted—in and its; and “grandames” has been substituted for “grandmothers.” All that remains is exactly as in the original, not a single word transposed, and the punctuation the same to a comma.
Again, take the brief homily that concludes the funeral: