K. “Is there nothing good about these poor water creatures? Have they no redeeming qualities?”
“Oh yes! The water temperament conduces to industry and perseverance. Water men and women are very good imitators, not actors, and do most of the second-rate work in the world. They are not un-sympathizing. Like air people, they take in easily the thoughts and lives of others, only they are always conscious of taking them in; they don’t lose themselves in others, as it is possible for the air followers to do. While they sympathize, they think how nice it is to be sympathetic; or, if they are women, perhaps the thought is how interesting I look while I am listening to this sad story.”
K. “Come now, I believe you have some particular water person in your mind, for you are getting satirical. It is well we are nearly home. What I can’t understand is, why all the four complexions have so much that is disagreeable in them. In which class would Böhme put really good and noble people?”
“They might come into any one of the four classes. You must remember that according to Böhme the temperament is an outer material atmosphere surrounding the soul, and of necessity partly evil, because it is material; the pure soul has to work through it, and conquer it, according to Böhme.”
SKETCHES
(In a Garden.)
A LADY. – A POET
The Lady
I
Sir POET, ere you crossed the lawn
(If it was wrong to watch you, pardon)
Behind this weeping birch withdrawn,
I watched you saunter round the garden.
I saw you bend beside the phlox;
Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle,
Review my well-ranged hollyhocks,
Smile at the fountain’s slender spurtle;
II
You paused beneath the cherry-tree,
Where my marauder thrush was singing,
Peered at the bee-hives curiously,
And narrowly escaped a stinging;
And then – you see I watched – you passed
Down the espalier walk that reaches
Out to the western wall, and last
Dropped on the seat before the peaches.
III
What was your thought? You waited long.
Sublime or graceful, – grave, – satiric?
A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song?
A tender Tennysonian lyric?
Tell me. That garden-seat shall be,
So long as speech renown disperses,
Illustrious as the spot where he —
The gifted Blank – composed his verses.
The Poet
IV
Madam, – whose uncensorious eye
Grows gracious over certain pages.
Wherein the Jester’s maxims lie,
It may be, thicker than the Sage’s
I hear but to obey, and could
Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you,
Some verse as whimsical as Hood, —
As gay as Praed, – should answer to you.
V
But, though the common voice proclaims
Our only serious vocation
Confined to giving nothings names,
And dreams a “local habitation;”
Believe me, there are tuneless days,
When neither marble, brass, nor vellum,
Would profit much by any lays
That haunt the poet’s cerebellum.
VI
More empty things, I fear, than rhymes,
More idle things than songs, absorb it;
The “finely-frenzied” eye, at times,
Reposes mildly in its orbit;
And, painful truth, at times, to him,
Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive,
“A primrose by a river’s brim”
Is absolutely unsuggestive.
VII
The fickle Muse! As ladies will,
She sometimes wearies of her wooer;
A goddess, yet a woman still,
She flies the more that we pursue her;
In short, with worst as well as best,
Five months in six, your hapless poet
Is just as prosy as the rest,
But cannot comfortably show it.
VIII
You thought, no doubt, the garden-scent
Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation
Of love that came and love that went, —
Some fragrance of a lost flirtation,
Born when the cuckoo changes song,
Dead ere the apple’s red is on it,
That should have been an epic long,
Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet.
IX
Or else you thought, – the murmuring noon,
He turns it to a lyric sweeter,
With birds that gossip in the tune,
And windy bough-swing in the metre;
Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms
Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms,
Round singing mouths, and chanted charms,
And mediæval orchard blossoms, —
X
Quite à la mode. Alas! for prose, —
My vagrant fancies only rambled
Back to the red-walled Rectory close,
Where first my graceless boyhood gambolled,
Climbed on the dial, teased the fish,
And chased the kitten round the beeches,
Till widening instincts made me wish
For certain slowly-ripening peaches.
XI
Three peaches. Not the Graces three
Had more equality of beauty:
I would not look, yet went to see;
I wrestled with Desire and Duty;
I felt the pangs of those who feel
The Laws of Property beset them;
The conflict made my reason reel,
And, half-abstractedly, I ate them; —
XII
Or Two of them. Forthwith Despair —
More keen than one of these was rotten —
Moved me to seek some forest lair
Where I might hide and dwell forgotten,
Attired in skins, by berries stained,
Absolved from brushes and ablution; —
But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained,
Fate gave me up to execution.
XIII
I saw it all but now. The grin
That gnarled old Gardener Sandy’s features;
My father, scholar-like and thin,
Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;
I saw – ah me – I saw again
My dear and deprecating mother;
And then, remembering the cane,
Regretted – THAT I’D LEFT THE OTHER.
THINGS GONE BY
Is it that things go by, or is it that people go by the things? If the former, it is no wonder that a good deal of gloom hangs about the matter. To be standing still, and to have a panorama constantly moving by one, bearing on its face all things fair and beautiful – happy love scenes, kindly friends, pleasant meetings, wise speeches, noble acts, stirring words, national epochs, as well as gay landscapes of hill and dale, and river and sun, and shade and trees, and cottages and labouring men and grazing cattle; to have all things moving by one, and oneself to stagnate and alone to be left behind, as all else moves on to greet the young, the hopeful, and the untried, – there is indeed something sad in this. We have seen these good and beautiful and soul-touching visions once. They charmed and entranced us as they lingered with us for a few brief and blissful moments, but they have gone by and left us alone. We shall never look upon them again. Yes, it is bitter – too bitter almost for man to dwell upon much. He must turn elsewhere, and try to bury the past in forgetfulness, gazing on the new visions as they in turn pass by him, knowing that their time is short, and that they too, like all the old ones, will very soon be as though they were not.
But it is not so. Man is passing the world by, and not the world man. Man is passing on, year after year, in his magnificent and irresistible course, never losing, and ever gaining. All he sees, and knows, and feels, and does becomes an inseparable part of himself, far more closely bound up with his life and nature than even his flesh, and nerves, and bones. It is not merely that he remembers the past and loves the past, but he is the past; and he is more the whole assembly of the past than he is anything else whatever. Man alone moves onward to perfection and to happiness, as a universe stands still ministering to his lordly progress. Even the life, the passions, and the personal progress of each particular man stand still, as it were, in the service of all the rest, and become their lasting and inalienable treasure. Nothing is wasted or irreparable but wrong-doing, and that too is not lost.
THINGS GONE BY
“Once more, who would not be a boy?” – or girl? and revel in the delights – real or imaginary – of things gone by? What a halo is round them! Their pleasures were exquisite, and their very miseries have in remembrance, a piquancy of flavour that is almost agreeable. I suppose the habit of most of us who have attained a certain, or rather uncertain age, is to revel in the past, to endure the present, and to let the future look after itself.
Now this is all well enough for the sentimentalist, or for the poet who, like Bulwer, can write at thirty “on the departure of youth.” But to the philosopher – that is, of course, to each member of “Pen and Pencil” – another and more useful tone of mind and method of comparison should not be absent. Is not the present what was the future to the past, and may we not by comparing the existing with what has been, as also with what was the aspiration of the past, throw some light, borrowed though it be, on what will be the present to our descendants? Mr. Pecksniff observes: “It is a poor heart that never rejoices.” Let us manifest our wealth – of imagination, shall I say? – by endeavouring to realize how, through the falsehood and wickedness of the past, we have arrived at our own lofty and noble eminence.
When we read, in the blood-stained pages of history, of nations and continents plunged into warfare of the most horrible and heartrending description, at the call of national glory or dynastic ambition, how can we sufficiently rejoice at the soft accents of peace and happiness which none would now venture to interrupt over the length and breadth of happy Europe?
The age of falsehood and party spirit may be said to have passed away. Our newspapers tell nothing but truth, and the only difference perceptible in their mild criticisms of friend or foe, is that they betray a generous tendency to do more than justice to their enemies.
If we cannot say that pauperism is extinct, yet we can honestly affirm that, if we cannot destroy the accursed thing itself, yet we can, and do so deal with paupers that the weakest, at least, soon cease to be a burden on the rates. Science and humanity have shaken hands, and the soft persuasions of chemical compounds are employed to assist down any unhappy girl who should be betrayed into aspirations towards the chimney-pot. We all know that gluttony is one of the greatest evils in the world, and which of our hearts could be hard enough not to glow with rapture at the benevolent rule of a London Union, mentioned in to-day’s paper, of never giving their inmates anything to tax their digestive forces between 5 P.M. and 8 A.M.
Again, when we read in our “Spectators” or other venerable records of the follies of fashion of 150 years ago, or indeed of any other epoch we like to recur to – of hoops and paint, and patches – how may we rejoice at the greater wisdom of our ladies in these days, in recognizing how beautifully they blend the tasteful with the useful! Their crinoline, how Grecian in its elegance; their chignons, how intellectual in appearance; their bonnets, how well calculated to protect from rain and sun; their trains, how cleanly; their boot-heels, how well calculated to produce by natural means what the barbarian Chinese seek by coarser methods – to deform the foot, and thus, by limiting their power of walking, to leave them more time for high intellectual culture.
Of the improvement in our social morals it is needless to speak, and indeed I must decline to do so, if only that in drawing a comparison I should have to shock the ears of “Pen and Pencil” with some allusions to things gone by. I will but casually refer to two salient characteristics of the enormities of bygone times – to novels and to the theatre. Compare but for a moment the wild and almost licentious writings of a Walter Scott, an Edgeworth, or an Austen with the pure and unexaggerated novels of the present halcyon time. And for our theatres, if it be possible to imagine anything more chaste and elevating than the existing drama – anything more stimulating to all that is purest, more repressive of all that is vulgar and low in our ballets or pantomimes – why, I very much mistake the realities that lie before us.
Finally, in the religion of the country – there where one looks for the summing up and climax as it were of all the incidental advances we have glanced at, how glorious is the spectacle! The fopperies of ecclesiastical upholstery banished from the land; the hardness and cruelty of dogmatic intolerance heard no more; a noble life everywhere more honoured than an orthodox belief.
Surely we have reached the Promised Land – it overflows with charity, with peace, plenty, and concord; and the only regret left to us is the fear that in so good a world none of us can entertain the hope to leave it better than we found it!
THINGS GONE BY
Some years go by so comfortably calm,
So like their fellows, that they all seem one;
Each answering each, as verses in a psalm,
We miss them not – until the psalm is done:
Until, above the mild responsive strain,
An alter’d note, a louder passage rolls,
Whose diapason of delight or pain
Ends once for all the sameness of our souls:
Until some year, with passionate bold hand,
Breaks up at length our languid liberty,
And changes for us, in one brief command,
Both all that was, and all that was to be.
Thenceforth, the New Year never comes unheard;
No noise of mirth, no lulling winter’s snow
Can hush the footsteps which are bringing word
Of things that make us other than we know.
Thenceforth, we differ from our former selves;
We have an insight new, a sharper sense
Of being; how unlike those thoughtless elves
Who wait no end, and watch no providence!
We watch, we wait, with not a star in view:
Content, if haply whilst we dwell alone
The memory of something live and true
Can keep our hearts from freezing into stone.
NO;
OR, THE LITTLE GOOSE-GIRL.A Tale Of The First Of May, 2099
The little Goose-girl came singing
Along the fields, “Sweet May, oh! the long sweet day.”
That was her song,
Bringing about her, floating about
In and out through the long fair tresses
Of her hair; oh! a thousand thousand idlenesses,
Spreading away on May’s breath everywhere
“Idleness, sweet idleness.”
But this was a time,
Two thousand and ninety-nine,
When, singing of idleness even in Spring,
Or drinking wind-wine,
Or looking up into the blue heaven
Was counted a crime.
A time, harsh, not sublime,
One terrible sort of school-
Hour all the year through,
When everyone had to do something, and do it by rule.
Why, even the babies could calculate
Two and two at the least, mentally, without a slate,
Each calling itself an aggregate
Of molecules —
It was always school – schools,
All over the world as far as the sky could cover
It – dry land and sea.
High Priests said,
“Let matter be Z,
Thoroughly calculated and tried
To work our problems with, before all eyes —
Anything beside that might prove a dangerous guide:
X’s and Y’s,
Unknown quantities,
We hesitate not, at once to designate
Fit only, now and for ever to be laid aside.”
So, you see
Everything was made as plain as could be,
Not the ghost of a doubt even left to roam about free.
Everybody’s concern
Being just to learn, learn, learn,
In one way – but only in one way.
Where then did the little Goose-girl come from that day?
I don’t know. Though
Isn’t there hard by
A place, tender and sunny,
One can feel slid between
Our seen and unseen,
And whose shadows we trace on the Earth’s face
Now and then dimly? – Well, she
Was as ignorant as she could ignorant be.
The world wasn’t school to her
Who came singing
“Sweet Idleness, sweet Idleness” up to the very feet
Of the Professors’ chairs,
And of the thousand thousand pupils sitting round upon theirs;
Who, up all sprang,
At the sound of the words she sang
With “No, no, no, no, no,
There are no sweets in May,
None in the weary day;
What foolish thing is this, singing of idleness in spring?”
“Oh! sunny spring,”
Still sang the little Goose-girl. Wondering
As she was passing —
And suddenly stay’d for a moment basking
In the broad light, with wide eyes asking
What “nay” could mean to the soft warm day.
And as she stay’d
There stray’d out from her
May breaths, wandering all the school over.
But now, the hard eyes move her
And her lips quiver
As the sweet notes shiver
Between them and die.
So her singing ceases, she
Looking up, crying, “Why is my May not sweet?
Is the wide sky fair?
Are the free winds fleet?
Are the feet of the Spring not rare
That tread flowers out of the soil?
Oh! long hours, not for toil,
But for wondering and singing.”
“No, no, no, no,”
These reply,
“Silly fancies of flowers and skies,
All these things we know.
There is nothing to wonder at, sing,
Love, or fear —
Is not everything simple, and clear,
And common, and near us, and weary?
So, pass by idle dreaming —
And you, if you would like to know
Being from seeming,
Come into the schools and study.”
“Still to sing sometimes when I have the will,
And be idle and ponder,”
Said the Goose-girl, “and look up to heaven and wonder?”
“What! Squander Truth’s time
In dreams of the unknown sublime —
No – ” Then “Ignorant always,” said she,
“I must be,”
And went on her way. “Sweet May, sad May” —
Hanging her head —
Till, “The mills of the gods grind slowly,” she said,
“But they grind exceeding small,
Let be, I will sit by the mills of the gods, and watch the slow atoms fall.”
So, patient and still, through long patient hours
As she laid her heart low in the hearts of the flowers,
Through clouds and through shine,
With smiles and with tears,
Through long hours, through sweet years;
Oh! years– for a hundred years was one
School-hour in two thousand and ninety-nine.
And see!
Who are these that come creeping out from the schools?
– Long ago, when idlenesses
Out of her tresses, stray’d the school over,
Some slept of the learners, some played.
These crept out to wonder and sing,
And look for her yonder,
Away up the hills,
Amongst the gods’ mills.
And now
“Is it this way?” they say,
Bowing low,
“Oh! wise, by the heaven in thine eyes
Teach – we will learn from thee —
Is it no, is it yes,
Labour or Idleness?”
She,
Answering meekly: “This —
Neither no, nor yes,
But ‘come into God and see.’”
Oh! the deeps we can feel; oh! the heights we must climb.
Oh! slow gentle hours of the golden time —
Here, the end of my rhyme.
May, 1869.
EXILE
Night falls in the convict prison, —
The eve of a summer day;
Through the heated cells and galleries,
The cooler nightwinds play.
And slumber on folded pinions
With oblivion brought relief;
Stilling the weary tossings, —
Smoothing the brow of grief.
Through a dungeon’s narrow grating
The slanting moonlight fell
Down by a careworn prisoner,
Asleep in his lonely cell.
The hand which lay so nerveless
Had grasp’d a sword ere now,
And the lips now parch’d with fever
Had utter’d a patriot’s vow.
He stirr’d and the silence was broken,
By the clanking of a chain,
He sigh’d, but the sigh no longer,
Show’d the spirit’s restless pain.
For to him the dark walls faded,
And the prisoner stood once more
Beneath the vine-wreath’d trellis,
Beside his loved home’s door.
And memory drew the faces
So dear in earlier days,
Of the sisters who were with him
Joining in childish plays,
And the mother whose lips first murmured
The prayer which had made him brave,
“Let his fate be what Thou wiliest,
But not, oh! not a slave.”
And the friends whose blood beat quickly
At the wrongs of their native land
And the vow they had vowed together,
Grasping each other’s hand.
He dreamt of the first resistance,
Of the one who basely fled;
And the guard’s o’erwhelming numbers
And the hopes of life all dead.
And then of the weary waiting,
An exile on foreign ground;
With stranger voices near him,
And unknown faces round.
Oh! ships o’er the gladsome waters,
What news do you bring to-day?
What tidings of home and kindred
To the exile far away?
And he dreamt of the glad returning
To the well-loved native shore;
When news had come – All are ready
To dare the fight once more.
Of the hearts that throbbed exulting,
With hope of the coming strife,
Of the sigh which fell unheeded
To the thought of child and wife.
And he dreamt of the day of contest,
Of whistling shot and shell,
When he bore his country’s banner,
And had borne it high and well.
“Rally for Freedom! Forward!
Stand! for our cause is Right;
Sooner be slain than defeated,
Better is death than flight.”
Ah! happy the first who perished,
Who saw not the turning day,
And the fallen flag, and the broken line,
And the rout without hope or stay!
And the prisoner groaned in his slumbers,
But now, with a sudden glow,
The glorious moonlight’s splendour
Poured full on his humid brow.
On its rays there floated to him
The friends of his early youth,
Who had borne their steadfast witness
In the holy cause of Truth.
“Welcome,” they said, “we await thee;
Come, and receive thy meed,
The crown of those who flinched not
In our country’s greatest need.”
Was it a dream, or delusion?
Or vision? Who shall say?
Its spell consoled the hours
Of many a weary day.
And months went slowly over,
And the winter’s icy breath
Blew chill through an empty dungeon:
The convict was freed – by Death.