[131] "Taillefer, who excellently sang, Mounted upon a charger swift, Before them went forth singing Of Charlemagne and Roland, Of Oliver and of the vassals Who died at Roncevaux."
[132] The ancient MS. of Versailles, now in the possession of M. Bourdillon, begins,
"Challes li rois à la barbe grifaigne
Sis ans toz plens a este en Espaigne," etc.,
the thirteen lines of the stanza all ending with the same rhyme.
LAUS PERENNIS.[133]
In the early days of emigration, before the industry of the Old World had cut down the forests and muddied the streams of the New, a young man sat at noontide by the banks of a river, an insignificant tributary of one of those mighty veins that intersect the continent from Canada to Florida. His face was a study. He had the features of the North, with thick, fair hair and glittering blue eyes, but his form was slighter, though not less sinewy, than a Saxon's. Nerves of steel and a will of iron, generosity and self-sacrifice, the bravery of an Indian and the fidelity of a dog—such was the tale revealed by his exterior. His history was simple. He was the son of a petty farmer in Normandy, and the foster-brother of the Baron de Villeneuve. He had been brought up with the young baron, an only child, and had been his companion in his studies as well as his sports. Every one noticed how refined his manner was, how noble his bearing; and yet his village friends never had reason to complain of any superciliousness in his deportment towards them. His mother, feeling that his superiority would be wasted if he remained in the groove in which it seemed his natural destiny to travel, earnestly wished for a different career for her favorite, and urged him to enter the priesthood. This he was too conscientious to do, feeling no call to so high an office; and his foster-brother, in his turn, warmly recommended the army. Napoleon was then in the full blaze of his military glory, and merit might win the metaphorical spurs of what remained as the substitute of knighthood, without the weary delays of official routine. But the young Norman was insensible to military glory. There was no fair damsel, with high cap and ancestral gold necklace, with spinning-wheel and a dowry of snowy, homespun linen, who had made his heart beat one second faster than it had in childhood. If his foster-brother had had a sister, Robert Maillard would have been the very man to have loved her as the knights of old loved the lady of their dreams, hoping for no reward save a knot of ribbon and a pitying glance of faint approval. He had read of such love, and of fairies, elves, and witches, of impossible quests, and of princely donations; but he felt that the world had changed, and that these things could never be again. Strong and brave as he was, he began life with a secret hopelessness, knowing that it could never give him the only things he longed for. One day, in the midst of his irresolution as to what work he should undertake, knowing all work to be but a passe-temps until eternity gave him the life he coveted, an old sea captain made his appearance in the inland village, and electrified the inhabitants by tales of discovery and adventure, of which curious proofs were not wanting in the shape of carved idols two inches long, mineral lumps of diminutive size, a string of wampum, etc., etc., and, above all, a tame monkey. Robert listened to the "ancient mariner" with delight, and, never having seen the ocean, was suddenly fired by a wild wish to try his fortune across the Atlantic. Here was a land as wild as the Armorican forests in the old tales of chivalry and legends of monasticism—a virgin land of practical freedom, where new empires might be carved by the strong and willing hand, and new mines of knowledge laid open by the daring intellect. It was not money that the simple Norman thought of; it was excitement, adventure, vague possibilities, limitless solitudes where hermits and hunters might live and dream. To leave Normandy was not exile to him; to leave all those he loved was not separation; but do not think he was heartless. He only lived in a shadow-world of high, heroic deeds, and the commonplaces of bucolic life palled upon him. Instinct bade him seek something beyond home, with its petty interests; and never slow to execute his resolutions, once they were formed, he bargained with the old sailor to take him to America as soon as he recrossed the ocean. From his father he received his portion of the scanty inheritance due to him, and left home as the prodigal—so said his weeping mother. His foster-brother loaded him with weapons of all kinds, and forced upon him clothes enough to last a lifetime in a country where fashion seldom changed. The first sight of the ocean was a poem to Robert. He thought of the galleys of the Crusaders, as they sailed to the Land of Promise; of Columbus and his unbelieving crew on their perilous way to the land of faith. The glorious western sunsets awoke a new feeling in the heart of the adventurer; he felt that this new "Ultima Thule" was the land of the poet as well as of the warrior, and that its majesty, its serene massiveness, should be, not the prey of murderous passion, but the field of a new-born art. Here was a land whose history, if it had any, had been blotted out, but whose immortal beauty was a picture of the lost Eden—the true home of enthusiasm, the virgin parchment on which to write a new hymn to the God whom its beauty revealed almost in a new light. Such were not the thoughts of most pilgrims to the New World; if they had been, people would have said that the millennium had come.
A Sir Galahad walks the earth but once in a century, and he has no compeers. Such was our Robert. Why does the world call those men dreamers whose ideal is the only true reality, while the life of the world around them is one long nightmare?
Robert's life, after he had landed in one of the old sea-coast cities, was a checkered one. He fled from the civilization that had stifled him at home, and which he saw with dismay roughly reproduced in the communities of the sea-board; he found few men whose talk did not jar upon him; even in the wilderness, when he came to a log-cabin, he heard the oaths of low city haunts; in pastoral settlements, he found no pastoral innocence; and even among the friendly Indians they asked him for spirits, when he would have spoken of God. Discouraged and oppressed, he persisted in setting his face ever westward, till at last he came to a river, as it seemed to him; a brook, as it would figure on the map. He wondered if man had ever been here before, but smiled to himself the moment after, knowing that the red man, the natural possessor of this princely inheritance, must have often breathed his prayer to the Great Spirit by the banks of this stream. He began to think how useless the discovery of this new continent had been, since hitherto the country had been but a new field for the white man's sins, a new theatre for the red man's sorrows. He fell to thinking of his own far-off ancestors, roaming morass and forest, like these sturdy men of bronze, hunting the deer, and wolf, and bear, like them, painting their bodies like them, worshipping bloody gods of war, rearing children indefatigable on sea and land—Scandinavian vikings, fair, and ruddy, and golden-haired, each man a chief in stature, and their chiefs giants. How like the race that still lorded it over these new realms! But God's messengers had come among the Norsemen and daunted their fierceness, turned their vices into virtues, and leavened, with a true and manly, a Christian, civilization, their hardy, freedom-loving tribes. Robert knew of the many efforts of the missionaries among the Indians; but he knew, also, that it was the evildoing of the whites that made these efforts so fruitless. It seemed as if wherever the human race set foot it must disturb God's working; and in sudden disgust at his kind, he vowed never willingly to enter again any community of whites. Commerce was imposition, respectability was hypocrisy, civilization was cruelty. "God and my dreams alone remain," he cried; "with them I will walk, and forget that any other building exists save a church; that there is any language save prayer; any human beings save God's worthy ministers!" Before long, the scent of the pines and cedars lulled him to sleep, and, happy in his isolation, he did not resist the drowsiness that, by the banks of Norman streamlets, had often preceded the sweetest moments of his life.
Soon the pines began to sing in the strong wind that rocked them, and the song shaped itself into a hymn of praise, the words seeming to echo the form of David's psalm: "Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the face of the Lord, for he cometh.... Praise him, ye strong winds that fulfil his word; ... fruitful trees and all cedars."