The man who has acknowledged his Creator amidst his most stupendous works, who has recognised his voice in the ocean storm, who has confessed his providence amidst the slaughter of battle, and witnessed the awful universality of that adoration that is wafted to Him from all nations, under all forms, from the simple smiting of the breast of the penitent solitary one, to the sublime pealings of the choral hymn, buoyed upon the resounding notes of the thunder-tongued organ in the high and dim cathedral,—the man who has witnessed and acutely felt all this, and has no feelings of piety, or deference to religion, must be endued with a heart hardened beyond the flintiness, as the Scriptures beautifully express it, “of the nether millstone.”
But my forte is not the serious. I am intent, and quiet, and thoughtful, only under the influence of great enjoyment. When I have most cause to deem myself blessed, or to call myself triumphant, it is then that I am stricken with a feeling of undesert, that I am grave with humility, or sad with the thought of human instability. But, on the eve of battle, on the yardarm in the tempest, or amidst the dying in the pest-house, say, O ye companions of my youth, whose jest was the most constant, whose laugh the loudest? Yet the one feeling was not real despondence, nor the other real courage. In the first place, it is no more than the soul looking beyond this world for the real; in the second, she is trifling in this world with the ideal. However, as in these pages I intend to attempt to be tolerably gay, it may be fairly presumed that I am very considerably unhappy, and dull, perhaps, as the perusal of these memoirs may make my readers.
As such great pains were taken, at least by me, in my religious education, it is not to be wondered at that I should not feel at all sedentary on the Sunday afternoons after church-time. In fact, I affected any position rather than the sitting one. But all the Sundays were not joyless to me. One, in particular, though the former part of it had been passed in sickening fear, and the middle in torturing pain, its termination was marked with a heartfelt joyousness, the cause of which I must record as a tribute of gratitude due to one of the “not unwashed,” but muddy-minded multitude.
I was stealing along mournfully under the play-ground wall with no hasty or striding step, not particularly wishing any rough or close contact of certain parts of my dress with my person, my passing schoolmates looking upon me in the manner that Shakespeare so beautifully describes the untouched deer regard the stricken hart. My soul was very heavy, and full of dark wonder. The sun was setting, and, to all living, it is either a time of solemn peace, or of instinctive melancholy when looked upon by the solitary one. Of a sudden I was roused from my gloom by the well-known, yet long missed shout of “Ralph! Ralph!” and, looking up, I discovered the hard-featured, grinning physiognomy of Joe Brandon, actually beaming with pleasure, on the top of the wall. How glad he was! How glad I was! He had found me! Instead of seeking the Lord in his various conventicles on the Sunday, he had employed that day, invariably, after I had been taken from his house, in reconnoitring the different boarding-schools in the vicinity, and at some distance from the metropolis. To this, no doubt, he was greatly instigated by the affection of my nurse, but I give his own heart the credit of its being a labour of love. The wall being too high to permit us to shake hands, at my earnest entreaty, he went round to the front; but, after having made known his desire,—literally, “a pampered menial drove him from the door.” Well, the wall, if not open to him, was still before and above him, and he again mounted it. Our words were few, as the boys began to cluster around me. He let drop to me fourpence-halfpenny, folded in a piece of brown paper, and disappeared. Oh, how I prize that pilgrim visit! Forget it, I never can! That meeting was to me a one bright light on my dark and dreary path. It enabled me to go forward; there was not much gloom between me and happier days—perhaps the light of joy that that occurrence shed enabled me to pass over the trial. It might have been that, at that period, I could have borne no more, and should have sunk under my accumulated persecutions. I will not say that so it was, for there is an elasticity in early youth that recovers itself against much—yet I was at that time heavy indeed with exceeding hopelessness. All I can say to the sneerer is, I wish, that at the next conclave of personages who may be assembled to discuss the destinies of nations, there may be as much of the milk of human kindness and right feelings among them as there was between me and the labouring sawyer, Joe Brandon, the one being at the top, and the other at the bottom of the wall.
The next Sunday, Brandon was again on the wall with a prodigious plum-cake. A regular cut-and-come-again affair: it fell to the ground with a heaviness of sound that beat the falling of Corporal Trim’s hat all to ribbons. To be sure, the corporal’s fell as if there had been a quantity of “clay kneaded in the crown of it,” whilst mine was kneaded with excellent dough. The Sunday after, there was the same appearance, varied with gingerbread, and then—for years, I neither saw, nor heard of him. Poor Joseph was threatened with the constable, and was put to no more expense for cakes for his foster-son.
Chapter Thirteen.
Pray remember the fifth of November—Rumours of wars—Preceded by scholastic elocution, and succeeded by a cold dinner, darkness, and determination.
I shall now draw the dolorous recital of what I have termed my epoch of despondency to a close. The fifth of November was approaching; I had been at school nearly two years, and had learned little but the hard lesson “to bear,” and that I had well studied. I had, as yet, made no friends. Boys are very tyrannical and very generous by fits. They will bully and oppress the outcast of a school, because it is the fashion to bully and oppress him—but they will equally magnify their hero, and are sensitively alive to admiration of feats of daring and wild exploit. With them, bravery is the first virtue, generosity the second. They crouch under the strong for protection, and they court the lavish from self-interest. In all this they differ from men in nothing but that they act more undisguisedly. Well, the fifth of November was fast approaching, on which I was to commence the enthusiastic epoch of my schoolboy existence. I was now twelve years of age. Almost insensible to bodily pain by frequent magisterial and social thrashings, tall, strong of my age, reckless, and fearless. The scene of my first exploit was to be amidst the excitement of a “barring out,” but of such a “barring out” that the memory of it remains in the vicinity in which it took place to this day.