Common writers are apt to forget that exaggerated expressions chill our sympathies; that passion becomes ignoble when entertained for ignoble objects; that when violent and unnatural, it is destructive of dignity. In the exaggeration of its outward signs, Passion is not exalted, but its reality is evaporized.
'The fire which mounts the liquor till it runs o'er,
In seeming to augment it, wastes it.'
The use and value of passion is not as a subject of contemplation in itself, but as it breaks up the fountains of the great deep of the heart, or displays its might and ribbed majesty, as the stability of mountains is best seen with the restless mist quivering about them, and the changeful clouds floating above them.
We have thus naturally arrived at the fact that Truth, another of the Divine Attributes, must make part of all art that would interest humanity; that the soul rejects violence, or the falsehood of exaggerated description.
'Sanctify your soul like a temple,' says Madame De Staël, 'and the angel of noble thoughts will not disdain to occupy it.' If the rays of 'Wisdom' were reflected through the rainbow of artistic beauty by the devout artist, he would again be, as of old, the Prophet; and the arts would find, in typification of the Divine Attributes, ceaseless variety, marvellous unity. Then might he stand before his Maker as the anointed high priest of nature, winning entrance into her mysteries and holy symbols, using his glorious gifts to lead his brethren back to God; and the artistic human word might become, in its appropriate sphere, the humble and devout interpreter of the Word Eternal!
REMEMBRANCE.
Last night, emerging from the glaring gaslight into the starlight beautiful and dim, there came, borne to me by the night wind, a gay young voice, blithely carolling the sweet strains of a well-remembered song, familiar to me long years ago in another and distant clime. It was a simple ballad, one heard most frequently in my youth, old when I was young; it was like a voice from the dead—a thought from the shrouded past appealing to my soul. There was something so solemn and strange, so mystically spiritual in the fact that a stranger in a strange land should possess the power to conjure up for me a world of saddest memories, that I half fancied at first (pardon an old man's dreaming) that one who had lived long ago, and died before her prime, seeing now as those see where the mists of pride and passion are dispelled forever by the light of unshadowed truth, conscious now of the deep and lasting wrong she had done herself and me, that she it was who was now singing to me through the lips of the lad, striving to cheer the loneliness she had caused, and comfort my desolate heart by telling me she was near me; and, obedient to the impulse given me by the wild fancy, I raised my tremulous voice, broken long ago, and quavered an accompaniment, and I and the unknown singer sang the last remaining stanza together.
I can never hear that song without tears. I never hear it, even though its half-forgotten strains, dreamily warbled, are oddly mingled with a widely different tune, in a bootless effort at remembrance; but my youth, with its golden promise, which maturer manhood but meagrely fulfilled, turns with the shadowed years veiling its brightness, and looks sorrowfully upon my old age in its solitude and desolation; but my life, with its wasted energies and flagging purpose, rises up before me, darkly and reproachfully reminding me of what I might have done, have been! O Heaven! what bitter years of suffering and crushing disappointment, years on which the tracks of time have left their blight and mildew, have passed since first I listened to the bird-like warbling of its simple strains. Then was the blissful May-time of my existence, when I was governed by youth's generous impulses, led captive by its sweet delusions, when I fondly dreamed that my life was destined to become a victory and a triumph, not the failure it has proved to be! I heard it first when the love that has lived unchanged through the mournful wastes of nearly half a century, was in the gray dawn of its immortal being. She sang it to me then, sweet Jennie Grey, whom I wooed, but never won. Memory, faithful treasurer, points back with mystic finger, and looking through the long vista of intervening years, standing now almost where time shall merge into eternity, that vision illuminating like a star the surrounding gloom, I can see the very night—I can see now as clearly as then—the round full moon lighting the dark waters with a long line of silvery brightness, crowning the tiny ripples with light as they broke upon the shore, and flooding the well-remembered room with its mellow radiance—see her, in her fresh young beauty, seated at the old instrument, the moonlight falling on her bright hair; the sweet eyes averted from my too admiring gaze, veiled beneath the drooping lashes, cast down with a coy pretence of studying the half-forgotten tune.
I can see myself, handsome, ardent YOUNG (so widely different NOW, I can speak of my former self without vanity), seated near, with all the love that filled my soul for her looking from my eyes.