This was an unexpected blow, and, in my state of weakness might have been a fatal one, but for my having found, at the bottom of the heap, a letter in the handwriting of Vincent. This excellent man, as if he had anticipated my vexations, wrote in a style singularly adapted to meet them at the moment. After slight and almost gay remarks on country occurrences, and some queries relative to my ideas of London; he touched on the difficulties which beset the commencement of every career, and the supreme necessity of patience, and a determination to be cheerful under all.
"One rule is absolutely essential," wrote he, "never to mourn over the past, or mope over the future. 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' is a maxim of incomparable wisdom. Never think of the failures of yesterday, but to avoid them to-morrow, and never speculate on the failures of to-morrow, but to remember that you have outlived the failures of to-day. The French philosophers are now preaching around the world, that knowledge is power, and so it is, but only as gunpowder is power; a dangerous invention which blew up the inventor. It requires to be wisely managed. English experience will tell you, more to the purpose, that 'perseverance is power;' for with it, all things can be done, without it nothing. I remember, in the history of Tamerlane, an incident which, to me, has always had the force of an apothegm.
"In early life, and when reduced to the utmost distress, defeated in battle, and without a follower, he one day threw himself into the ruins of a Tartar caravansera, where he resolved to give up all further effort, and die. As he lay on the ground, sunk in despair, his eye was caught by the attempts of an ant to drag a grain of corn up to its nest in the wall. The load was too great for it, and the ant and the grain fell to the ground together. The trial was renewed, and both fell again. It was renewed ninety and nine times, and on the hundredth it succeeded, and the grain was carried into the nest. The thought instantly struck the prostrate chieftain, 'Shall an insect struggle ninety and nine times until it succeeds, while I, a man, and the descendant of heroes, give up all hope after a single battle?' He sprang from the ground, and found a troop of his followers outside, who had been looking for him through the wilderness. Scimitar in hand, he threw himself on his pursuers, swelled his troop into an army, his army into myriads, and finished by being the terror of Europe, the conqueror of Asia, and the wonder of the world." The letter finished with general enquiries into the things of the day, and all good wishes for my career.
It is astonishing what an effect is sometimes produced by advice, given at the exact moment when we want it. This letter was the "word in season" of which the "wisest of men" speaks; and I felt all its influence in my rescue from despondency. Its simplicity reached my heart more than the most laboured language, and its manliness seemed a direct summons to whatever was manly in my nature. I determined thenceforth, to try fortune to the utmost, to task my powers to the last, to regard difficulties as only the exercise that was intended to give me strength, and to render every success only a step to success higher still. That letter had pushed me another stage towards manhood.
With the Horse Guards' papers in my hand, and the letter of my old friend placed in a kind of boyish romance, in my bosom, I went to meet Mordecai and his daughter. The Jew shook his bushy brows over the rescript which seemed to put a perpetual extinguisher on my military hopes. But Mariamne was the gayest of the gay, on what she termed my "fortunate ill-fortune." She had now completely recovered; said she remembered nothing of her accident but "the heroism," as she expressed it, "on my part which had saved her to thank me;" and between her gratitude and her vivacity, might have given a spectator the idea that M. Lafontaine was rapidly losing ground with that creature of open lips and incessant smiles. Her harp was brought, she was an accomplished performer, and she surprised me by the taste and tenderness with which she sung a succession of native melodies, collected in her rambles from Hungary to the Hartz; and from the Mediterranean to the Alps and Pyrenees. One air struck me as so beautiful that I still remember the words. They were Garcilasso's:—
"De las casualidades
Y las quimeras,
Nacen felicidades
Que no se esperano.
Siempre se adviente
Que donde esta la vida,
Se halla la muerte."
Then with that quick turn of thought which forms so touching a feature of the love-poetry of Spain—
"Tus ojos a mis ojos,
Miran atentos,
Y callando se dicen
Sus sentimientos.
Cosa es bien rara,
Que sin hablar se entienden
Nuestras dos almas."
The Spaniard, in his own language, is inimitable. I cannot come nearer the soft Southern than these ballad lines—
"Alas,—how sweet, yet strange!
Joy in the lap of woe!
Love, all a change!
Like roses laid on snow,
Nipt by the cruel wind;
Love, all unkind!