Poetic dreams float round me now,
My spirit where art thou?
Oh! art thou watching the moonbeams smile
On the groves of palm in an Indian isle;
Or dost thou hang over the lovely main
And list to the boatswain’s boisterous strain;
Or dost thou sail on sylphid wings
Through liquid fields of air,
Or, riding on the clouds afar,
Dost thou gaze on the beams of the evening star
So beautiful and so fair.
O no! O no! sweet spirit of mine
Thou art entering a holy strain divine
A strain which is so sweet,
Oh, one might think ’twas a fairy thing,
A thing of love and blessedness,
Singing in holy tenderness,
A lay of peaceful quietness,
Within a fairy street!
But ah! ’tis Brown, &c. &c.
A piece “from Walter Scott” opened with:—
The heath-cock shrill his clarion blew
Among the heights of Benvenue,
And fast the sportive echo flew,
Adown Glenavin’s vale.
But louder, louder was the knell,
Of Brown’s Northumbrian penance-bell,[337]
The noise was heard on Norham fell,
And rung through Teviotdale.
These burlesques were chiefly produced by the law and medical students in Newcastle and Durham, and the young gentlemen of the Catholic College of Ushaw, near the latter place. As the writer of this sketch was once congratulating Mr. Brown on his numerous respectable correspondents, the old man said that he had an acquaintance far superior to any of his earthly ones, and no less a personage than the angel Gabriel, who, he stated, brought him letters from Joanna Southcote, and call to carry back his answers! This “Gabriel” was a young West Indian then residing in Durham, who used to dress himself in a sheet with goose wings on his shoulders and visit the poet at night, with letters purporting to be written to him in heaven by the far-famed prophetess. After “Gabriel” left Durham, Brown was frequently told of the deception which had been practised upon him, but he never could be induced to believe that his nocturnal visiter was any other than the angel himself. “Did I not,” he once said, “see him clearly fly out at the ceiling!” Brown used to correspond with some of Joanna’s followers in London, on the subject of these supposed revelations, and actually found (credite posteri) believers in the genuineness.
Amongst Brown’s strange ideas, one was that he was immortal, and should never die. Under this delusion when ill he refused all medical assistance, and it induced him at the age of 90 to sell the little property which he acquired by marriage, for a paltry guinea a week, to be paid during the life of himself and Mrs. Brown, and the life of the survivor. The property he parted from, in consideration of this weekly stipend, was a leasehold house in Sadler-street, (the theatre having been pulled down soon after the erection of the present one opposite to it,) and the house was conveyed to two Durham tradesmen, Robinson Emmerson and George Stonehouse, by whom the allowance was for some time regularly paid; but on the latter becoming embarrassed in his circumstances, the payment was discontinued, and poor Brown and his aged wife were thrown on the world without a farthing, at a time when bodily and mental infirmities had rendered them incapable of gaining a livelihood. Far be it from the writer of this to cast any aspersion on Messrs. Emmerson and Stonehouse, but it does certainly appear to him that their conduct to Brown was unkind to say the least of it. After this calamity Brown became for a few months an inhabitant of a poor-house, which he subsequently left for a lodging at an obscure inn, where, on the 11th of July, 1823, he died in a state of misery and penury at the advanced age of 92; his wife shortly afterwards died in the poorhouse. They are both interred in the churchyard of St. Oswald.
Such was James Brown the Durham poet, who with all his eccentricities was an honest, harmless and inoffensive old man. Of his personal appearance, the excellent [portrait] which accompanies this memoir from a drawing by Mr. Terry is an exact resemblance. All who knew him will bear testimony to its correctness. It is indeed the only one in existence that gives a correct idea of what he was. The other representations of him are nothing better than caricatures. D.
NATURALISTS’ CALENDAR.
Mean Temperature 58·45.