“He who Joy would win,
Must share it: Happiness was born a twin.”
Such was the solace that arrived to soothe the dreary path of Daniel Gumb. He wooed and won a maiden of his native village, who, amid the rugged rocks and appellatives of Cornwall, had the soft Italian name of Florence. But where, amid the utter poverty of his position and prospects, could he find the peaceful and happy wedding-roof that should bend over him and his bride? His friends were few, and they too poor and lowly to aid his start in life. He himself had inherited nothing save a strong head and heart, and two stalwart hands. He looked around him and afar off, and there was no avenue for house or home. Suddenly he recalled to mind his wandering days and his houseless nights, the scanty food, the absorbing meditation, and the kindly shelter of many a nook in the hollow places of the granite rock. He formed his plan, and made it known to his future and faithful bride; she assented with the full-hearted strength and trusting sacrifice of a woman’s love. Then he went forth in the might of his simple and strong resolve,—his tools in his scrip, and a loaf or two of his accustomed household bread. He sought the well-known slope under Carradon, searched many a mass of Druid rock, and paced around cromlech and pillared stone of old memorial,[71] until he discovered a primeval assemblage of granite slabs suited to his toil. One of these, grounded upon several others, the vast boulders of some diluvian flood, had the rude semblance of a roof. Underneath this shelving rock he scooped away the soil, finding, as he dug on, more than one upright slice of moorstone, which he left to stand as an inner and natural wall. At last, at the end of a few laborious days, Daniel stood before a large cavern of the rocks, divided into chambers by upstanding granite, and sheltered at a steep angle by a mountainous mass of stone. Nerved and sustained by the hopeful visions which crowded on his mind, and of which he firmly trusted that this place would be the future scene, he toiled on until he had finally framed a giant abode such as that wherein Cyclops shut in Ulysses and his companions, and promised to “devour No-man the last.” Materials for the pavement and for closing up the inner walls were scattered abundantly around—nay, the very furniture for that mountain-home was at once ready for his hand; for as Agag,[72] king of the Amalekites, had his vaunted iron bed, so did Gumb frame and hew for himself and Florence, his wife, table and seat and a bedstead of native stone. Then he smoothed out and shot into a groove a thick and heavy door, so that, closed like an Eastern sepulchre, it demanded no common strength to roll away the stone. When all had been prepared, the bridegroom and the bride met at a distant church; the simple wedding-feast was held at her father’s house; and that night the husband led the maiden of his vows, the bride of his youth, to their wedding-rock! If he had known the ode, he might have chanted, in Horatian[73] verse, that day—
“Nunc scio quid sit amor, duris in cotibus illum”
“Now know I what true love is; in rugged dens he dwells.”
Here the wedded pair dwelt in peace long and happy years, mingling the imagery of old romance with the sterner duties of practical life. As a far-famed hewer of stone, the skill and energy of this singular man never lacked employ, nor failed to supply the necessities of his moorland abode. Like a patriarch in his tent amid the solitudes of Syria, he was his own king, prophet, and priest. He paid neither rent, nor taxes, nor tithe. When children were born to him, he exercised unwittingly the power of lay-baptism which was granted in the primitive Church to the inhabitants of a wilderness, afar from the ministry of the priesthood, and his wife was content to be “churched” by her own cherished husband, among the altars of unhewn stone that surrounded their solitary cell. Who shall say that this simple worship of the father and the mother with their household, amid the paradise of hills, was not as sweet, with the balsam of the soul, as the incense-breathing psalm of the cathedral choir? Rightly or wrongly, it is known that Daniel entertained an infinite contempt for “the parsons” whose territories bordered on the moor. Not one of them, it was his wont to aver, could cross the Asses’ Bridge of his favourite Euclid, a feat he had himself accomplished in very early youth; nor could the most learned among them all unravel the mysteries of his chosen companions, the wandering stars that travelled over Carradon every night. Long and frequent were his vigils for astronomical researches and delight. To this day the traveller will encounter on the face of some solitary rock a mathematical diagram carefully carved by some chisel and hand unknown; and while speculation has often been rife as to the Druidical origin of the mystic figure, or the scientific knowledge of the early Kelts, the local antiquary is aware that these are the simple records of the patient studies of Daniel Gumb.
When the writer of this article visited the neighbourhood in 183-, there still survived relics and remembrances of this singular man. There were a few written fragments[74] of his thoughts and studies still treasured up in the existing families of himself and his wife. Here is a transcript: “Mr. Cookworthy told me, when I saw him last, that astronomers in foreign parts, and our great man Sir Isaac here at home, had thought that the planets were so vast, and so like our earth in their ways, that they might have been inhabited by men; but he said, ‘their elements and atmosphere are thought to be unfit for human life and breath.’ But surely God would not have so wasted His worlds as to have made such great bright masses of His creation to roll along all barren, as it were, like desert places of light in the sky. There must be people of some kind there: how I should like to see them, and to go there when I die!”
Another entry on the same leaf: “Florence asked me to-day if I thought that our souls, after we are dead, would know the stars and other wise things better than we can now. And I answered her, Yes; and if I could—that is, if I was allowed to—the first thing I would try should be to square the circle true, and then, if I could, I would mark it and work it out somewhere hereabouts on a flat rock, that my son might find it there, and so make his fortune and be a great man. N.B.—Florence asked me to write this down.”
On a thick sheet of pasteboard, with a ground-plan of a building on the other side, he had written: “January 16, 1756.—A terrible storm last night. Thunder and lightning and hail, with a tempest of wind. Saw several dead sheep on the moor. Shipwrecks, no doubt, at sea. A thought came into my mind, Why should such harm be allowed to be done? I read some reasons once in a book that Mr. Cookworthy lent me, called ‘The Origin of Evil;’ but I could not understand a word of it. My notion is, that when evil somehow came into the world, God did not destroy it at once, because He is so almighty that He let it go on, to make manifest His power and majesty; and so He rules over all things, and turns them into good at the last. N.B.—The devil is called in the Bible the Prince of the Powers of the Air: so he may be, but he must obey his Master. The poor wretch is but a slave after all!”
On the fly-leaves of an old account-book the following strange statement appears: “June 23, 1764.—To-day, at bright noon, as I was at my work upon the moor, I looked up, and saw all at once a stranger standing on the turf, just above my block. He was dressed like an old picture I remember in the windows of St. Neot’s Church, in a long brown garment, with a girdle; and his head was uncovered and grizzled with long hair. He spoke to me, and he said, in a low, clear voice, ‘Daniel, that work is hard!’ I wondered that he should know my name, and I answered, ‘Yes, sir; but I am used to it, and don’t mind it, for the sake of the faces at home.’ Then he said, sounding his words like a psalm, ‘Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening; when will it be night with Daniel Gumb?’ I began to feel queer; it seemed to me that there was something awful about the unknown man. I even shook. Then he said again, ‘Fear nothing. The happiest man in all the earth is he that wins his daily bread by his daily sweat, if he will but fear God and do no man wrong.’ I bent down my head like any one confounded, and I greatly wondered who this strange appearance could be. He was not like a preacher, for he looked me full in the face; nor a bit like a parson, for he seemed very meek and kind. I began to think it was a spirit, only such ones always come by night, and here was I at noonday, and at work. So I made up my mind to drop my hammer and step up and ask his name right out. But when I looked up he was gone, and that clear out of my sight, on the bare wide moor suddenly.[75] I only wish that I had gone forward at once and felt him with my hand, and found out if he was a real man or only a resemblance. What could it mean! Mem. to ask Mr. C.”
This event is recorded in a more formal and painful handwriting than the other MSS. which survive. Nothing could be further removed from superstition or fear than this man’s whole character and mind. Hard as one of his native rocks, and accurate as a diagram, yet here is a tinge of that large and artless belief which is so inseparable from a Keltic origin, and which is so often manifested by the strongest and loftiest minds. Another paragraph, written on the blank page of an almanac, runs thus: “Found to-day, in the very heart of a slab rock that came out below the granite, the bony skeleton of a strange animal, or rather some kind of fish. The stone had never been broken into before, and looked ages older than the rocks above. Now, how came this creature to get in, and to die and harden there? Was it before Adam’s time, or since? What date was it? But what can we tell about dates after all? Time is nothing but Adam’s clock—a measurement that men invented to reckon by. This very rock with the creature in it was made, perhaps, before there was any such thing as time. In eternity may be—that is, before there were any dates begun. At all events, when God did make the rock, He must have put the creature there.” This appears to be a singular and rude anticipation of modern discovery, and a simple solution of a question of science in our own and later time. It is to be lamented that these surviving details of a thoughtful and original life are so few and far between.