“She has left me,” he said—“left me. Mary is in her grave!”
I felt my heart swell, as the image of that loveliest of creatures came rising to my view in all her beauty, as I had seen her by the river side; and I knew not what to reply.
“Yes,” continued my friend, “she’s in her grave;—we parted for a few days, to re-unite, as we hoped, for ever; and, ere these few days had passed, she was in her grave. But I was unworthy of her—unworthy even then; and now—— But she is in her grave!”
I grasped his hand. “It is difficult,” I said, “to bid the heart submit to these dispensations, and, oh, how utterly impossible to bring it to listen! But life—your life, my friend—must not be passed in useless sorrow. I am convinced, and often have I thought of it since our last meeting, that yours is no vulgar destiny—though I know not to what it tends.”
“Downwards!” he exclaimed—“it tends downwards;—I see, I feel it;—the anchor of my affection is gone, and I drift shoreward on the rocks.”
“’Twere ruin,” I exclaimed, “to think so!”
“Not half an hour ere my father died,” he continued, “he expressed a wish to rise and sit once more in his chair; and we indulged him. But, alas! the same feeling of uneasiness which had prompted the wish, remained with him still, and he sought to return again to his bed. ‘It is not by quitting the bed or the chair,’ he said, ‘that I need seek for ease: it is by quitting the body.’ I am oppressed, Mr. Lindsay, by a somewhat similar feeling of uneasiness, and, at times, would fain cast the blame on the circumstances in which I am placed. But I may be as far mistaken as my poor father. I would fain live at peace with all mankind—nay, more, I would fain love and do good to them all; but the villain and the oppressor come to set their feet on my very neck, and crush me into the mire—and must I not resist? And when, in some luckless hour, I yield to my passions—to those fearful passions that must one day overwhelm me—when I yield, and my whole mind is darkened by remorse, and I groan under the discipline of conscience, then comes the odious, abominable hypocrite—the devourer of widows’ houses and the substance of the orphan—and demands that my repentance be as public as his own hollow, detestable prayers. And can I do other than resist and expose him? My heart tells me it was formed to bestow—why else does every misery that I cannot relieve render me wretched? It tells me, too, it was formed not to receive—why else does the proffered assistance of even a friend fill my whole soul with indignation? But ill do my circumstances agree with my feelings. I feel as if I were totally misplaced in some frolic of nature, and wander onwards in gloom and unhappiness, seeking for my proper sphere. But, alas! these efforts of uneasy misery are but the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops round the walls of his cave.”
I again began to experience, as on a former occasion, the o’ermastering power of a mind larger beyond comparison than my own; but I felt it my duty to resist the influence. “Yes, you are misplaced, my friend,” I said—“perhaps more decidedly so than any other man I ever knew; but is not this characteristic, in some measure, of the whole species? We are all misplaced; and it seems a part of the scheme of deity, that we should work ourselves up to our proper sphere. In what other respect does man so differ from the inferior animals as in those aspirations which lead him through all the progressions of improvement, from the lowest to the highest level of his nature?”
“That may be philosophy, my friend,” he replied, “but a heart ill at ease finds little of comfort in it. You knew my father: need I say he was one of the excellent of the earth—a man who held directly from God Almighty the patent of his honours? I saw that father sink broken-hearted into the grave, the victim of legalized oppression—yes, saw him overborne in the long contest which his high spirit and his indomitable love of the right had incited him to maintain—overborne by a mean, despicable scoundrel, one of the creeping things of the earth. Heaven knows I did my utmost to assist in the struggle. In my fifteenth year, Mr. Lindsay, when a thin, loose-jointed boy, I did the work of a man, and strained my unknit and overtoiled sinews as if life and death depended on the issue, till oft, in the middle of the night, I have had to fling myself from my bed to avoid instant suffocation—an effect of exertion so prolonged and so premature. Nor has the man exerted himself less heartily than the boy—in the roughest, severest labours of the field, I have never yet met a competitor. But my labours have been all in vain—I have seen the evil bewailed by Solomon—the righteous man falling down before the wicked.” I could answer only with a sigh. “You are in the right,” he continued, after a pause, and in a more subdued tone: “man is certainly misplaced—the present scene of things is below the dignity of both his moral and intellectual nature. Look round you—(we had reached the summit of a grassy eminence which rose over the wood, and commanded a pretty extensive view of the surrounding country)—see yonder scattered cottages, that, in the faint light, rise dim and black amid the stubble fields—my heart warms as I look on them, for I know how much of honest worth, and sound, generous feeling shelters under these roof-trees. But why so much of moral excellence united to a mere machinery for ministering to the ease and luxury of a few of, perhaps, the least worthy of our species—creatures so spoiled by prosperity that the claim of a common nature has no force to move them, and who seem as miserably misplaced as the myriads whom they oppress?”
“If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—
By nature’s law designed—
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?