The wife knelt at the bedside, and while the husband, exhausted by his agitation, sank back with closed eyes on the pillow, she read the noble petition for the sick, from the book of Common Prayer. At times the sobs of Emily would almost choke her utterance, but the holy words she read had at length, a soothing effect both on her mind and that of her husband. When the prayer was over, she remained for several minutes kneeling, while her husband murmured at intervals his heart-felt responses. At length she rose from the bedside. Her husband would again have spoken, to beseech once more her forgiveness. But with a glad feeling at her heart—a feeling such as she had not had for years—she enjoined silence on him, and sat down again by his bedside to watch. At length he fell again into a calm slumber, while the now happy wife watched at his bedside until morning, breathing thanksgivings for her husband’s recovery, and shedding tears of joy the while.
When the sick man awoke at daybreak, he was a changed being. He was now convalescent, he was more, he was a repentant man. He wept on the bosom of his wife, and made resolutions of reformation which, after his recovery, through the blessing of God, he was enabled to fulfil.
The fortune of Walpole was mostly gone, but sufficient remained from its wrecks, to allow him the comforts, though not the luxuries of life. He soon settled his affairs and removed from his splendid mansion to a quiet cottage in a neighboring village. The only pang he felt was at leaving the home which for so many years had been the dwelling of the head of his family—the home where his uncle had died, and which had been lost only through his own folly.
Neither Walpole nor his wife ever regretted their loss of fortune; for both looked upon it as the means used by an over-ruling Providence to bring the husband back to the path of rectitude; and they referred to it therefore with feelings rather of gratitude than of repining. In their quiet cottage, on the wreck of their wealth, they enjoyed a happiness to which they had been strangers in the days of their opulence. A family of lovely children sprung up around them, and it was the daily task of the parents to educate these young minds in the path of duty and rectitude. Oh! the happy hours which they enjoyed in that white, vine-embowered cottage, with their children smiling around them, and the consciousness of a well regulated life, filling their hearts with peace.
Years rolled by and the hair of Walpole began to turn gray, while the brow of his sweet wife showed more than one wrinkle, but still their happiness remained undiminished.
LOWELL’S POEMS.[[1]]
A NEW SCHOOL OF POETRY AT HAND.
We shall never forget our emotions when we inhaled, for the first time after a lingering illness, the fresh breezes of a September morning. Oh! the visions of dewy meadows, rustling forest trees, and silvery brooks which the delicious air called up before us. This little book has awakened much the same emotions in our bosom. It reminds us of the breezy lawns where we played when a child; of the old mossy forest trees beneath which we loved to sit and muse; of the silent, stately Brandywine that glided along at our feet, its clear waters sliding over the rocks or rippling against the long willow leaves that trembled in its current. There is a freshness about Lowell’s Poems which bewitches our fancy. They display a genius that has startled us. They breathe a healthy, honest, good old Saxon spirit, that opens our heart to them as by a sign of brotherhood. We feel that he is kin of our kin and blood of our blood, and we take his book to our bosom without suffering it to plead the exquisite petition which he has put into its mouth, for “charity in Christ’s dear name.” Lowell is a man after our own heart. We have a word or two to say of him in connection with the poetry of the day.
Every one must have perceived that a new school of poetry is at hand. No one who has thought on the subject can have failed to see that the fever for Byron, like all fevers, is both wearing itself out and exhausting the patient. With the death of the noble lord began the decline of the school to which he gave such popularity, and though he has had many imitators since, the phrenzy respecting his poetry is nearly over. We do not mean to depreciate Byron. Every great poet should be spoken of with reverence; for they all alike discourse in the language of the gods; and Byron was not only a great poet, but the greatest poet of his school. That school, however, was a bad one—the fierce, unholy offspring of an incestuous age. It was a school in which the restlessness of passion seems to have forced its votaries into poetry. They had none of the calm, enduring enthusiasm of the great poets of the past; they did not speak with the majesty of Jove, but with the fury of a Delphin priestess. They were essentially the poets of a crowd, expressing the emotions of men in a state of high excitement, and consequently whirling away their hearers with them in a phrenzy for the time unconquerable, but destined to subside with the first calm in the public mind. But the truly great poets—Milton, Shakspeare and Spencer—sit far away on a mountain by themselves, singing in calm enthusiasm to the stars of heaven, and startling the dweller on the plain as well as the shepherd on the hill-side with a melody that seems a part of heaven. The school of Byron is that of a generation; the school of the old masters is that of eternity. The one is a lurid planet, that blazes fitfully amid storm and darkness; the others are fixed stars, that shine around Milton, the greatest of all, in undimmed and undying lustre.