"He that hath light within his own clear breast,
May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day;
But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts,
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself is his own dungeon."
Such men are powerful preachers of the truth that universal benevolence is the true panacea of life; and, although it was a pleasant fiction of brother Charles, "that Tim Linkinwater was born a hundred and fifty years old, and was gradually coming down to five and twenty," yet he who habitually cultivates such a sentiment will, as years roll by, attain more and more to the spirit of a little child; and the hour will come when that principle shall conduct the possessor to immortal happiness and eternal youth.
If, then, our guest is called upon to state what are
"The drugs, the charms,
The conjuration and the mighty magic,
He's won our daughters with,"
well might he reply, that in endeavoring to relieve the oppressed, to elevate the poor, and to instruct and edify those of a happier condition, he had only held "the mirror up to Nature. To show virtue her own form—scorn her own image." That "this only was the witchcraft he had used;" and, did he need proof of this, there are many fair girls on both sides of the water who, though they might not repeat the whole of Desdemona's speech to a married man, yet could each tell him,
"That if he had a friend that loved her,
He should but teach him how to tell his stories,
And that would win her."
I would, gentlemen, it were in my power to present, as on the mirror in the Arabian tale, the various scenes in our extended country, where the master-mind of our guest is at this moment acting. In the empty school-room, the boy at his evening task has dropped his grammar, that he may roam with Oliver or Nell. The traveller has forgotten the fumes of the crowded steamboat, and is far off with our guest, among the green valleys and hoary hills of old England. The trapper, beyond the Rocky Mountains, has left his lonely tent, and is unroofing the houses in London with the more than Mephistopheles at my elbow. And, perhaps, in some well-lighted hall, the unbidden tear steals from the father's eye, as the exquisite sketch of the poor schoolmaster and his little scholar brings back the form of that gifted boy, whose "little hand" worked its wonders under his guidance, and who, in the dawning of intellect and warm affections, was summoned from the school-room and the play-ground forever. Or to some bereaved mother the tender sympathies and womanly devotion, the touching purity of little Nell, may call up the form where dwelt that harmonious soul, which uniting in itself God's best gifts, for a short space shed its celestial light upon her household, and then vanishing, "turned all hope into memory."
But it is not to scenes like these that I would now recall you. I would that my voice could reach the ear of every admirer of our guest throughout the land, that with us they might welcome him, on this, his first public appearance to our shores. Like the rushing of many waters, the response would come to us from the bleak hills of Canada, from the savannas of the South, from the prairies of the West, uniting in an "earthquake voice" in the cheers with which we welcome Charles Dickens to this new world.