Have you ever entered, all alone, the shadows of some dilapidated old burial-place, and in a nook made beautiful by wild-briers and a flowering thorn, beheld the stone image of some long-forgotten worthy lying on his grave? Some knight who perhaps had fought in Palestine,—or some holy man, who in the Abbey—now almost gone—had led a long still life of prayer? The moment you knew that you were standing among the dwellings of the dead, how impressive became the ruins! Did not that stone image wax more and more lifelike in its repose? And as you kept your eyes fixed on the features Time had not had the heart to obliterate, seemed not your soul to hear the echoes of the Miserere sung by the brethren?
So looks Christopher—on his couch—in his alcove. He is taking his siesta—and the faint shadows you see coming and going across his face are dreams. 'Tis a pensive dormitory, and hangs undisturbed in its spiritual region as a cloud on the sky of the Longest Day when it falls on the Sabbath.
What think you of our Father, alongside of the Pedlar in "The Excursion?" Wordsworth says—
"Amid the gloom,
Spread by a brotherhood of lofty elms,
Appear'd a roofless hut; four naked walls
That stared upon each other! I look'd round,
And to my wish and to my hope espied
Him whom I sought; a man of reverend age,
But stout and hale, for travel unimpair'd.
There was he seen upon the cottage bench,
Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep;
An iron-pointed staff lay at his side."
Alas! "stout and hale" are words that could not be applied, without cruel mocking, to our figure. "Recumbent in the shade" unquestionably he is—yet, "recumbent" is a clumsy word for such quietude; and, recurring to our former image, we prefer to say, in the words of Wilson,—
"Still is he as a frame of stone
That in its stillness lies alone,
With silence breathing from its face,
For ever in some holy place,
No "iron-pointed staff lies at his side"—but "Satan's dread," the Crutch! Wordsworth tells us over again that the Pedlar—
"With no appendage but a staff,
The prized memorial of relinquish'd toils,
Upon the cottage-bench reposed his limbs,
Screen'd from the sun."
On his couch, in his Alcove, Christopher is reposing—not his limbs alone, but his very essence. The Crutch is, indeed, both de jure and de facto the prized memorial of toils—but, thank Heaven, not relinquished toils; and then how characteristic of the dear merciless old man—hardly distinguishable among the fringed draperies of his canopy, the dependent and independent Knout!