"If the dead could come in dreams," he wrote, "my pious mother would no night fail to visit me. Far be the thought that she should, by a happier life, have been made so cruel that, when aught vexes my heart, she should not even console in a dream the son whom she loved with an only love."
[310]. Tom o' Bedlam.
This poem has been at hide-and-seek with the world for many years past. Mr. Frank Sidgwick has now played Seek, however, and has tracked it down in the British Museum in a manuscript, No. 24665, inscribed "Giles Earle—his book, 1615." In this manuscript the poem consists of eight stanzas of ten lines each, with a chorus of five lines. The version in this book is only of twenty-five lines, as they were arranged by Mrs. Meynell in her beautiful Anthology, The Flower of the Mind. Here are the chief differences which Mr. Sidgwick has very kindly allowed me to collect from his account of his search:
Line 1, "moon" is morn. Line 2, "lovely" is lonely, "marrow" is morrow. Line 10, "rounded" is wounded. Line 16, "a heart" is a host. And line 21, "with" is by. It is a happy exercise of the wits to choose between them and to find reasons for one's choice. When and by whom the poem was written is not yet known. It remains a shining jewel in the crown of the most modest of all men of genius, Mr. Anon.
[314]. "What's in there."
This far-carrying rhyme belongs to the ancient and famous game of Dump. "He who speaks first in it," says Dr. Gregor, "or laughs first, or lets his teeth be seen, gets nine nips, nine nobs, nine double douncornes, an' a gueed blow on the back o' the head."
The faht and fahr, I suppose, are the pleasant Scots way of saying what and where.
[316].
So may the omission of a few commas effect a wonder in the imagination. To the imagination indeed there is nothing absurd in, "I saw the sun at twelve o'clock at night"—for one can actually see in the "little nowhere of the mind" both burning sun and black night together: as once in a dream I myself was enchanted by three moons in the sky, shining in their silver above waters as wide as those of Milton's curfew. So, too, even mere day-by-day objects will take on themselves a strangeness and beauty never seen or "marked" before, if (like Marcus Aurelius and his loaf of bread) we will only "glut" the eye on them. "I see a rose," said an old woman on her deathbed, "but if, in childhood and youth, I had seen it closer, what a rose on the threshold it had been!"
Here is another old nursery "nonsense" rhyme that makes almost as lively pictures in the mind: