I point so often to the feelings, the ideas, or the ceremonies of religion, because there never yet was profound grief nor profound philosophy which did not inosculate at many points with profound religion. But I request the reader to understand, that of all things I was not, and could not have been, a child trained to talk of religion, least of all to talk of it controversially or polemically. Dreadful is the picture, which in books we sometimes find, of children discussing the doctrines of Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the boundaries and distinctions between doctrine and doctrine. And it has often struck me with amazement, that the two things which God made most beautiful among his works, viz. infancy and pure religion, should, by the folly of man, (in yoking them together on erroneous principles,) neutralize each other's beauty, or even form a combination positively hateful The religion becomes nonsense, and the child becomes a hypocrite. The religion is transfigured into cant, and the innocent child into a dissembling liar.[12]
God, be assured, takes care for the religion of children wheresoever his Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a national church established, to which a child sees his friends resorting; wheresoever he beholds all whom he honours periodically prostrate before those illimitable heavens which fill to overflowing his young adoring heart; wheresoever he sees the sleep of death falling at intervals upon men and women whom he knows, depth as confounding to the plummet of his mind as those heavens ascend beyond his power to pursue—there take you no thought for the religion of a child, any more than for the lilies how they shall be arrayed, or for the ravens how they shall feed their young.
God speaks to children also in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal by the truths and services of a national church, God holds "communion undisturbed" with children. Solitude, though silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone—all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel into God's presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this world appals or fascinates a child's heart, is but the echo of a far deeper solitude through which already he has passed, and of another solitude deeper still, through which he has to pass: reflex of one solitude—prefiguration of another.
Oh, burthen of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his being—in his birth, which has been—in his life, which is—in his death, which shall be—mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and art, and art to be;—thou broodest, like the spirit of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the principles of all things, solitude for a child is the Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude in life of millions upon millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them. Deep is the solitude of those who, with secret griefs, have none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood, bringing before it at intervals the final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. Reader, I tell you a truth, and hereafter I will convince you of this truth, that for a Grecian child solitude was nothing, but for a Christian child it has become the power of God and the mystery of God. Oh, mighty and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be—thou, kindling under the torch of Christian revelations, art now transfigured for ever, and hast passed from a blank negation into a secret hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of infancy the very dimmest of his truths!
MRS POOLE'S "ENGLISHWOMAN IN EGYPT."[13]
An "Englishwoman in Egypt," thanks to the Mediterranean steamers and the overland route to India, is no longer so unusual or astounding a spectacle as it would appear to have been five-and-twenty years ago, when that dilettante traveller, Monsieur le Comte de Forbin, made a precipitate retreat from Thebes in consequence of the shock sustained by his nerves, from encountering among the ruins "une femme-de-chambre Anglaise, en petit spencer couleur de rose," in the person of the Countess of Belmore's lady's-maid; though the Quarterly Reviewers, who in those days had no mercy for a French misstatement, even in the colour of a soubrette's dress, triumphantly declared the offending garment to have been "a pale-blue pelisse;" and proceeded to demolish the hapless Count accordingly—(Quarterly Review, Vol. xxiii. p. 92.) Since the period of this rencontre, the ill-omened blue eyes,[14] as well as blue pelisses, of our countrywomen, have been seen with sufficient frequency on the banks of the Nile to render the one, it is to be hoped, no longer an object of alarm to the natives, nor the latter to errant members of the Institute: but a narrative of the impressions produced on a cultivated female mind by a residence among the modern inhabitants of the land of the pyramids, was still a desideratum. The "Notes" (published in 1840 in the Asiatic Journal) of the late lamented Emma Roberts, than whom no one would have been better qualified to fill up the void, though replete with interest and information, are merely those of a traveller hastening through the country on her way to India; and, except the fugitive sketches of Mrs Dawson Damer, we cannot call to mind a single one among all the lady-tourists, with whose tours and voyages the press has lately teemed, who has touched on this hitherto unbroken ground. In such a dearth of information, we may deem ourselves doubly fortunate in finding the task undertaken by a lady possessing such peculiar advantages as must have been enjoyed by the sister of the well-known Orientalist, to whose pen we are indebted for perhaps the most comprehensive and accurate account ever published of the habits and manners of any nation, and under whose immediate superintendence, as we are informed, the work before us was prepared.
The title of the "Englishwoman in Cairo," would perhaps have more appropriately designated the character of Mrs Poole's volumes than that which she has adopted; since her opportunities of personal observation, after her arrival in the capital from Alexandria, were bounded by the environs of the city, her excursions from which do not appear to have extended further than the pyramids. A considerable portion of the first volume is occupied by an abstract of Egyptian history from the time of the Arab conquest, an account of the foundation of Cairo, an agricultural and general calendar for each month of the year, and various matters connected with the physical features, statistics, &c., of the country. These dissertations form a sort of supplement to the work of her brother, from whose MS. notes they are avowedly taken; being introduced (as Mrs Poole, with much naïveté, confesses) "in the hope of obtaining a more favourable reception for her letters, for the sake of the more solid matter with which they are interspersed;" but though they certainly convey much valuable additional information to the readers of the "Modern Egyptians," they are scarcely "germane to the matter," as interpolations in the work of a lady. The authoress can very well afford to rest her claim to popularity on her own merits; and we prefer to follow her, in her own peculiar sphere, into those mysterious recesses of an Oriental establishment, whither no male footstep can ever penetrate. Mrs Poole is probably the first English lady who has been admitted, not merely as a passing visitor, but as a privileged friend, into the hareems of those of the highest rank in the Egyptian capital. We find her threading the narrow and crowded thoroughfares of Cairo, borne aloft on the "high ass,"[15] (the usual mode of conveyance for morning calls;) and are introduced to the wives and daughters of the viceroy, and even (in the hareem of Habeeb Effendi) to ladies of the imperial house of Othman, in the ease and disinvoltura of their domestic circles, amid that atmosphere of dolce far niente and graceful etiquette, in which the hours of an Oriental princess appear to be habitually passed. With the exception of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's piquant sketches of the Turkish hareems and their inmates, and the singular narrative of her personal experience of life in an Indian zenana, by Mrs Meer Hassan Ali,[16] we know no female writer who has enjoyed such opportunities for the delineation of the scenes of domestic privacy of the East, and who has so well availed herself of them, as the sister of Mansoor Effendi, in the pages before us.
The narrative opens with the landing of the authoress and her companions at Alexandria in July 1842; but that city, with its double harbour, its quays crowded with a motley assemblage of every nation and language in Europe and the Levant, and the monuments of antiquity in its environs, has been too often described to present too much opportunity for novelty of remark. Passing over, therefore, the details given of these well-known objects, we find the party, after a rapid passage along the Mahmoodiyeh canal in an iron track-boat, drawn by four horses, and a vexatious delay of two days at the junction of the canal and the river, (during which the want of musquitto-curtains gave them an ample foretaste of the quantity and quality of the insect plagues of Egypt,) fairly embarked on the broad stream of the Nile. The voyage to Cairo was performed in a kanjeh, or passage-boat of the kind usual on the river—a long, narrow craft, with two masts, bearing large triangular sails; and Mrs Poole, in common with most travellers arriving for the first time in the East, was greatly impressed by the simple devotion with which the Reyyis (or Arab captain) and his crew commended themselves, on setting sail, to the protection of Providence, by reciting altogether, in a low voice, the short prayer of the Fathah, or opening chapter of the Koran. "The sight of the Muslim engaged in his devotions is, I think, most interesting; the attitudes are particularly striking and impressive; and the solemn demeanour of the worshipper, who, even in the busy market-place, appears wholly abstracted from the world, is very remarkable. The practice of praying in a public place is so general in the East, and attracts so little notice from Muslims, that we must not regard it as the result of hypocrisy or ostentation."