How thoroughly will the character of an early love tinge the whole of a life! Our affections are like flowers,—they derive their sweetness and their bloom from the soil in which they grow: some, budding in joy and gladness, amid the tinkling plash of a glittering fountain, live on ever bright and beautiful; others, struggling on amid thorns and wild weeds, overshadowed by gloom, preserve their early impressions to the last,—their very sweetness tells of sadness.
To conquer the memory of this hopeless passion, I tried a hundred ways. I endeavored, by giving myself up to the duties of a country gentleman, to become absorbed in all the cares and pursuits which had such interest for my neighbors. Failing in this, I became a sportsman; I kept horses and dogs, and entered, with all the zest mere determination can impart, upon that life of manly exertion, so full of pleasure to thousands. But here again without succeeding.
I went into society; but soon retired from it, on finding, that among the class of my equals the prestige of my early life had still tracked me. I was in their eyes a rebel, whose better fortune had saved him from the fate of his companions. My youth had given no guarantee for my manhood; and I was not trusted. Baffled in every endeavor to obliterate my secret grief, I recurred to it now, as though privileged by fate, to indulge a memory nothing could efface. I abandoned all the petty appliances by which I sought to shut out the past, and gave myself up in full abandonment to the luxury of my melancholy.
Living entirely within the walls of my demesne, never seen by my neighbors, not making nor receiving visits, I appeared to many a heartless recluse, whose misanthropy sought indulgence in solitude; others, less harshly, judged me as one whose unhappy entrance on life had unfitted him for the station to which fortune had elevated him. By both I was soon forgotten.
The peasantry were less ungenerous, and more just. They saw in me one who felt acutely for the privations they were suffering; yet never gave them that cheap, delusive hope, that legislative changes will touch social evils,—that the acts of a parliament will penetrate the thousand tortuous windings of a poor man's destiny. They found in me a friend and an adviser. They only-wondered at one thing,—how any man could feel for the poor, and not hate the rich. So long had the struggle lasted between affluence and misery, they could not understand a compromise.
Bitter as their poverty had been, it never extinguished the poetry of their lives. They were hungry and naked; but they held to their ancient traditions, and they built on them great hopes for the future. The old family names, the time-honored memories of place, the famous deeds of ancestors, made an ideal existence powerful enough to exclude the pressure of actual daily evils; and they argued from what had been to what might be, with a persistency of hope it seemed almost cruel to destroy. So deeply were these thoughts engrained into their natures, they felt him but half their friend who ventured to despise them. The relief of present poverty, the succor of actual suffering, became in their eyes an effort of mere passing kindness. They looked to some great amelioration of condition, some wondrous change, some restoration to an imaginary standard of independence and comfort, which all the efforts of common interference fell sadly short of; and thus they strained their gaze to a government, a ruling power, for a boon undefined, unknown, and illimitable.
To expectations like these advice and slight assistance are as the mere drop of water to the parched tongue of thirst; and so I found it. I could neither encourage them in their hopes of such legislative changes as would greatly ameliorate their condition, nor flatter them in the delusion that none of their misfortunes were of home origin; and thus, if they felt gratitude for many kindnesses, they reposed no confidence in my opinion. The trading patriot, who promised much while he pocketed their hard-earned savings; the rabid newspaper writer, who libelled the Government and denounced the landlord,—were their standards of sympathy; and he who fell short of either was not their friend.
In a word, the social state of the people was rotten to its very core. Their highest qualities, degraded by the combined force of poverty, misrule, and superstition, had become sources of crime and misery. They had suffered so long and so much, their patience was exhausted; and they preferred the prospect of any violent convulsion which might change the face of the land, whatever dangers it might come with, to a slow and gradual improvement of condition, however safe and certain.
To win their confidence at the only price they would accord it, I never could consent to; and without it I was almost powerless for good. Here again, therefore, did I find closed against me another avenue for exertion; and the only one of all I could have felt a fitting sphere for my labor. The violence of their own passionate natures, the headlong impulses by which they suffered themselves to be swayed, left them no power of judgment regarding those whose views were more moderate and temperate. They could understand the high Tory landlord, whom they invested with every attribute of tyranny, as their open, candid opponent; they could see a warm friend in the violent mob-orator of the day; but they recognized no trait of kindness in him who would rather see them fed than flattered, and behold them in the enjoyment of comfort sooner than in the ecstasy of triumph.
From “Darby the Blast”—for he was now a member of my household—I learned the light in which I was regarded by the people, and heard the dissatisfaction they expressed that one who “sarved Boney” should not be ready to head a rising, if need be. Thus was I in a false position on every side. Mistrusted by all, because I would neither enter into the exaggerations of party, nor become blind to the truth my senses revealed before me, my sphere of utility was narrowed to the discharge of the mere duties of common charity and benevolence, and my presence among my tenantry no more productive of benefit than if I had left my purse as my representative.