We daresay you are a very modest person; but we are all given to self-glorification, private men and public, individuals and nations; and every one Era and Ego has been prouder than another of its respective achievements. To hear the Present Generation speak, such an elderly gentleman as the Past Generation begins to suspect that his personal origin lies hid in the darkness of antiquity; and worse—that he is of the Pechs. Now, we offer to back the Past Generation against the Present Generation, at any feat the Present Generation chooses, and give the long odds. Say Poetry. Well, we bring to the scratch a few champions—such as, Beattie, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Bowles, Burns, Baillie, Campbell, Graham, Montgomery, Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hunt, Hogg, Shelley, Keates, Pollok, Cunningham, Bloomfield, Clare, and risum teneatis amici—Ourselves.
"All with waistcoats of red and breeches of blue,
And mighty long tails that come swingeing through."
And at sight of the cavalcade—for each poet is on his Pegasus—the champions of the Present Generation, accoutred in corduroy kilts and top-boots, and on animals which, "well do we know, but dare not name," wheel to the right-about with "one dismal universal bray," brandishing their wooden sabres, till, frenzied by their own trumpeters, they charge madly a palisade in their own rear, and as dismounted cavalry make good their retreat. This in their strategies is called a drawn battle.
Heroes, alive or dead, of the Past Generation, we bid you hail! Exceeding happiness to have been born among such Births—to have lived among such Lives—to be buried among such Graves. O great glory to have seen such Stars rising one after another larger and more lustrous—at times, when dilated with delight, more like Moons than Stars—like Seraphs hovering over the earth they loved, though seeming so high up in heaven!
To whom now may the young enthusiast turn as to Beings of the same kind with himself, but of a higher order, and therefore with a love that fears no sin in its idolatry? The young enthusiast may turn to some of the living, but he will think more of others who are gone. The dead know not of his love, and he can hold no communion with the grave. But Poets never die—immortal in their works, the Library is the world of spirits; there they dwell, the same as in the flesh, when by meditation most cleansed and purified—yet with some holy change it seems—a change not in them but in us, who are stilled by the stillness, and attribute something supernatural to the Living Dead.
Since first this Golden Pen of ours—given us by One who meant it but for a memorial—began, many years ago, to let drop on paper a few careless words, what quires so distained—some pages, let us hope, with durable ink—have accumulated on our hands! Some haughty ones have chosen to say rather, how many leaves have been wafted away to wither? But not a few of the gifted—near and afar—have called on us with other voices—reminding us that long ago we were elected, on sight of our credentials—not indeed without a few black balls—into the Brotherhood. The shelf marked with our initials exhibits some half-dozen volumes only, and has room for scores. It may not be easily found in that vast Library; but, humble member as we are, we feel it now to be a point of honour to make an occasional contribution to the Club. So here is the First Series of what we have chosen to call our Recreations. There have been much recasting and remoulding—many alterations, believed by us to have been wrought with no unskilful spirit of change—cruel, we confess, to our feelings, rejections of numerous lucubrations to their father dear—and if we may use such words, not a few new creations, in the same genial spirit in which we worked of old—not always unrewarded by sympathy, which is better than praise.
For kindness shown when kindness was most needed—for sympathy and affection—yea, love itself—for grief and pity not misplaced, though bestowed in a mistaken belief of our condition, forlorn indeed, but not wholly forlorn—for solace and encouragement sent to us from afar, from cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them, we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly within his miserable heart.
One word embraces all these pages of ours—Memorials. Friends are lost to us by removal—for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten. But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may have read together, "when life itself was new," and poetry overflowed the whole world; or a lock of her hair in whose eyes we first knew the meaning of the word "depth." And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity—and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns—the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore—what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell!
Why so sad a word—Farewell? We should not weep in wishing welfare, nor sully felicity with tears. But we do weep because evil lies lurking in wait over all the earth for the innocent and the good, the happy and the beautiful; and, when guarded no more by our eyes, it seems as if the demon would leap out upon his prey. Or is it because we are so selfish that we cannot bear the thought of losing the sight of the happiness of a beloved object, and are troubled with a strange jealousy of beings unknown to us, and for ever to be unknown, about to be taken into the very heart, perhaps, of the friend from whom we are parting, and to whom in that fear we give almost a sullen farewell? Or does the shadow of death pass over us while we stand for the last time together on the sea-shore, and see the ship with all her sails about to voyage away to the uttermost parts of the earth? Or do we shudder at the thought of mutability in all created things—and know that ere a few suns shall have brightened the path of the swift vessel on the sea, we shall be dimly remembered—at last forgotten—and all those days, months, and years that once seemed eternal, swallowed up in everlasting oblivion?
With us all ambitious desires some years ago expired. Far rather would we read than write nowadays—far rather than read, sit with shut eyes and no book in the room—far rather than so sit, walk about alone anywhere