It was, indeed, an awful moment. Death in its worst shape was before them, and a terrible duty still remained to be performed.
Edward’s cheek was blanched; his eye had a fixed look, yet he moved and spoke with a species of mechanical action, which had something almost ghastly in it. Causing the body to be removed into the house, he bade the captain summon the servants of the deceased and then motioning with his hand to the awe-struck sexton, he proceeded with him to the church-yard. A few clods of earth alone were removed ere the captain stood by his friend’s side.
Here we must pause. Perhaps it were better altogether to emulate the silence that was maintained then and afterward by the two comrades. But the sexton could not be bribed to entire secrecy, and it was a story he loved to tell, with details we gladly omit, of how Wensleben solemnly performed his task—of how no doubt could any longer exist as to the cause of Hallberg’s death. Those who love the horrible must draw on their own imaginations to supply what we resolutely withhold.
Edward, we believe, never alluded to D’Effernay’s death, and all the awful circumstances attending it, but twice—once, when, with every necessary detail, he and the captain gave their evidence to the legal authorities; and once, with as few details as possible, when he had an interview with the widow of the murderer, the beloved of the victim. The particulars of this interview he never divulged, for he considered Emily’s grief too sacred to be exposed to the prying eyes of the curious and the unfeeling. She left the neighborhood immediately, leaving her worldly affairs in Wensleben’s hands, who soon disposed of the property for her. She returned to her native country, with the resolution of spending the greater part of her wealth in relieving the distresses of others, wisely seeking, in the exercise of piety and benevolence, the only possible alleviation of her own deep and many-sided griefs. For Edward, he was soon pronounced to have recovered entirely, from the shock of these terrible events. Of a courageous and energetic disposition, he pursued the duties of his profession with a firm step, and hid his mighty sorrow deep in the recesses of his heart. To the superficial observer, tears, groans, and lamentations are the only proofs of sorrow; and when they subside, the sorrow is said to have passed away also. Thus the captive, immured within the walls of his prison-house, is as one dead to the outward world, though the jailer be a daily witness to the vitality of affliction.
WORDSWORTH’S POSTHUMOUS POEM.[J]
This is a voice that speaks to us across a gulf of nearly fifty years. A few months ago Wordsworth was taken from us at the ripe age of fourscore, yet here we have him addressing the public, as for the first time, with all the fervor, the unworn freshness, the hopeful confidence of thirty. We are carried back to the period when Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Rogers, and Moore were in their youthful prime. We live again in the stirring days when the poets who divided public attention and interest with the Fabian struggle in Portugal and Spain, with the wild and terrible events of the Russian campaign, with the uprising of the Teutonic nations, and the overthrow of Napoleon, were in a manner but commencing their cycle of songs. This is to renew, to antedate, the youth of a majority of the living generation. But only those whose memory still carries them so far back, can feel within them any reflex of that eager excitement, with which the news of battles fought and won, or mail-coach copies of some new work of Scott, or Byron, or the Edinburgh Review, were looked for and received in those already old days.
We need not remind the readers of the Excursion, that when Wordsworth was enabled, by the generous enthusiasm of Raisley Calvert, to retire with a slender independence to his native mountains, there to devote himself exclusively to his art, his first step was to review and record in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them. This was at once an exercise in versification, and a test of the kind of poetry for which he was by temperament fitted. The result was a determination to compose a philosophical poem, containing views of man, of nature, and of society. This ambitious conception has been doomed to share the fate of so many other colossal undertakings. Of the three parts of his Recluse, thus planned, only the second (the Excursion, published in 1814) has been completed. Of the other two there exists only the first book of the first, and the plan of the third. The Recluse will remain in fragmentary greatness, a poetical Cathedral of Cologne.
Matters standing thus, it has not been without a melancholy sense of the uncertainty of human projects, and of the contrast between the sanguine enterprise and its silent evaporation (so often the “history of an individual mind”), that we have perused this Prelude which no completed strain was destined to follow. Yet in the poem itself there is nothing to inspire depression. It is animated throughout with the hopeful confidence in the poet’s own powers, so natural to the time of life at which it was composed; it evinces a power and soar of imagination unsurpassed in any of his writings; and its images and incidents have a freshness and distinctness which they not seldom lost, when they came to be elaborated, as many of them were, in his minor poems of a later date.