Motion and Rest are the two feet upon which existence goes. All action
and all definite power result from the intimacy and consent of these
opposite principles. If, therefore, one would construct any serviceable
mechanism, he must incorporate into it, and commonly in a manifold way,
a somewhat passive, a somewhat contrary, and, as it were, inimical to
action, though action be the sole aim and use of his contrivance. Thus,
the human body is penetrated by the passive and powerless skeleton,
which is a mere weight upon the muscles, a part of the burden that,
nevertheless, it enables them to bear. The lever of Archimedes would
push the planet aside, provided only it were supplied with its
indispensable complement, a fulcrum, or fixity: without this it will not
push a pin. The block of the pulley must have its permanent attachment;
the wheel of the locomotive engine requires beneath it the fixed rail;
the foot of the pedestrian, solid earth; the wing of the bird rests upon
the relatively stable air to support his body, and upon his body to gain
power over the air. Nor is it alone of operations mechanical that the
law holds good: it is universal; and its application to pure mental
action may be shown without difficulty. A single act of the mind is
represented by the formation of a simple sentence. The process consists,
first, in the mind's fixing upon and resting in an object, which
thereby becomes the subject of the sentence; and, secondly, in
predication, which is movement, represented by the verb. The reader will
easily supply himself with instances and illustrations of this, and need
not, therefore, be detained.
In the economy of animal and vegetable existence, as in all that Nature
makes, we observe the same inevitable association. Here is perpetual
fixity of form, perpetual flux of constituent,—the ideas of Nature
never changing, the material realization of them never ceasing to
change. A horse is a horse through all the ages; yet the horse of to-day
is changed from the horse of yesterday.
If one of these principles seem to get the start, and to separate
itself, the other quickly follows. No sooner, for example, does any
person perform an initial deed, proceeding purely (let us suppose) from
free will, than Nature in him begins to repose therein, and consequently
inclines to its repetition for the mere reason that it has been once
done. This is Habit, which makes action passive, and is the greatest of
labor-saving inventions. Custom is the habit of society, holding the
same relation to progressive genius. It is the sleeping partner in the
great social firm; it is thought and force laid up and become
fixed capital. Annihilate this,—as in the French Revolution was
attempted,—and society is at once reduced to its bare immediate force,
and must scratch the soil with its fingers.
Sometimes these principles seem to be strictly hostile to each other and
in no respect reciprocal, as where habit in the individual and custom in
society oppose themselves bitterly to free will and advancing thought:
yet even here the special warfare is but the material of a broader and
more subtile alliance. An obstinate fixity in one's bosom often serves
as a rock on which to break the shell of some hard inclosed faculty.
Upon stepping-stones of our slain selves we mount to new altitudes. So
do the antagonisms of these principles in the broader field of society
equally conceal a fundamental reciprocation. By the opposition to
his thought of inert and defiant custom, the thinker is compelled to
interrogate his consciousness more deeply and sacredly; and being
cut off from that sympathy which has its foundation in similarity of
temperaments and traditions, he must fall back with simpler abandonment
upon the pure idea, and must seek responses from that absolute nature of
man which the men of his time are not human enough to afford him. This
absolute nature, this divine identity in man, underrunning times,
temperaments, individualities, is that which poet and prophet must
address: yet to speak to it, they must speak from it; to be heard
by the universal heart, they must use a universal language. But
this marvellous vernacular can be known to him alone whose heart is
universal, in whom even self-love is no longer selfish, but is a pure
respect to his own being as it is Being. Well it is, therefore, that
here and there one man should be so denied all petty and provincial
claim to attention, that only by speaking to Man as Man, and in the
sincerest vernacular of the human soul, he can find audience; for thus
it shall become his need, for the sake of joy no less than of duty, to
know himself purely as man, and to yield himself wholly to his immortal
humanity. Thus does fixed custom force back the most moving souls, until
they touch the springs of inspiration, and are indued with power: then,
at once potent and pure, they gush into history, to be influences, to
make epochs, and to prevail over that through whose agency they first
obtained strength.
Thus, everywhere, through all realms, do the opposite principles of Rest
and Motion depend upon and reciprocally empower each other. In every
act, mechanical, mental, social, must both take part and consent
together; and upon the perfection of this consent depends the quality
of the action. Every progress is conditioned on a permanence; every
permanence lives but in and through progress. Where all, and with
equal and simultaneous impulse, strives to move, nothing can move, but
chaos is come; where all refuses to move, and therefore stagnates, decay
supervenes, which is motion, though a motion downward.
Having made this general statement, we proceed to say that there are two
chief ways in which these universal opposites enter into reciprocation.
The first and more obvious is the method of alternation, or of rest
from motion; the other, that of continuous equality, which may be
called a rest in motion. These two methods, however, are not mutually
exclusive, but may at once occupy the same ground, and apply to the same
objects,—as oxygen and nitrogen severally fill the same space, to the
full capacity of each, as though the other were absent.
Instances of the alternation, either total or approximative, of these
principles are many and familiar. They may be seen in the systole and
diastole of the heart; in the alternate activity and passivity of the
lungs; in the feet of the pedestrian, one pausing while the other
proceeds; in the waving wings of birds; in the undulation of the sea; in
the creation and propagation of sound, and the propagation, at least,
of light; in the alternate acceleration and retardation of the earth's
motion in its orbit, and in the waving of its poles. In all vibrations
and undulations there is a going and returning, between which must exist
minute periods of repose; but in many instances the return is simply a
relaxation or a subsidence, and belongs, therefore, to the department of
rest. Discourse itself, it will be observed, has its pauses, seasons of
repose thickly interspersed in the action of speech; and besides these
has its accented and unaccented syllables, emphatic and unemphatic
words,—illustrating thus in itself the law which it here affirms.
History is full of the same thing; the tides of faith and feeling now
ascend and now subside, through all the ages, in the soul of humanity;
each new affirmation prepares the way for new doubt, each honest doubt
in the end furthers and enlarges belief; the pendulum of destiny swings
to and fro forever, and earth's minutest life and heaven's remotest star
swing with it, rising but to fall, and falling that they may rise again.
So does rhythm go to the very bottom of the world: the heart of Nature
pulses, and the echoing shore and all music and the throbbing heart and
swaying destinies of man but follow and proclaim the law of her inward
life.
The universality and mutual relationship of these primal principles
have, perhaps, been sufficiently set forth; and this may be the place to
emphasize the second chief point,—that the perfection of this mutuality
measures the degree of excellence in all objects and actions. It
will everywhere appear, that, the more regular and symmetrical their
relationship, the more beautiful and acceptable are its results. For
example, sounds proceeding from vibrations wherein the strokes and
pauses are in invariable relation are such sounds as we denominate
musical. Accordingly all sounds are musical at a sufficient distance,
since the most irregular undulations are, in a long journey through the
air, wrought to an equality, and made subject to exact law,—as in
this universe all irregularities are sure to be in the end. Thus, the
thunder, which near at hand is a wild crash, or nearer yet a crazy
crackle, is by distance deepened and refined into that marvellous bass
which we all know. And doubtless the jars, the discords, and moral
contradictions of time, however harsh and crazy at the outset, flow
into exact undulation along the ether of eternity, and only as a pure
proclamation of law attain to the ear of Heaven. Nay, whoso among men is
able to plant his ear high enough above this rude clangor may, in like
manner, so hear it, that it shall be to him melody, solace, fruition,
a perpetual harvest of the heart's dearest wishes, a perpetual
corroboration of that which faith affirms.
We may therefore easily understand why musical sounds are musical, why
they are acceptable and moving, while those affront the sense in which
the minute reposes are capricious, and, as it were, upon ill terms with
the movements. The former appeal to what is most universal and cosmical
within us,—to the pure Law, the deep Nature in our breasts; they fall
in with the immortal rhythm of life itself, which the others encounter
and impugn.
It will be seen also that verse differs from prose as musical sounds
from ordinary tones; and having so deep a ground in Nature, rhythmical
speech will be sure to continue, in spite of objection and protest, were
it, if possible, many times more energetic than that of Mr. Carlyle. But
always the best prose has a certain rhythmic emphasis and cadence: in
Milton's grander passages there is a symphony of organs, the bellows of
the mighty North (one might say) filling their pipes; Goldsmith's flute
still breathes through his essays; and in the ampler prose of Bacon
there is the swell of a summer ocean, and you can half fancy you hear
the long soft surge falling on the shore. Also in all good writing,
as in good reading, the pauses suffer no slight; they are treated
handsomely; and each sentence rounds gratefully and clearly into rest.
Sometimes, indeed, an attempt is made to react in an illegitimate way
this force of firm pauses, as in exaggerated French style, wherein the
writer seems never to stride or to run, but always to jump like a frog.
Again, as reciprocal opposites, our two principles should be of equal
dignity and value. To concede, however, the equality of rest with motion
must, for an American, be not easy; and it is therefore in point to
assert and illustrate this in particular. What better method of doing so
than that of taking some one large instance in Nature, if such can
be found, and allowing this, after fair inspection, to stand for all
others? And, as it happens, just what we require is quite at hand;—the
alternation of Day and Night, of sleep and waking, is so broad, obvious,
and familiar, and so mingled with our human interests, that its two
terms are easily subjected to extended and clear comparison; while also
it deserves discussion upon its own account, apart from its relation to
the general subject.
Sleep is now popularly known to be coextensive with Life,—inseparable
from vital existence of whatever grade. The rotation of the earth
is accordingly implied, as was happily suggested by Paley, in the
constitution of every animal and every plant. It is quite evident,
therefore, that this necessity was not laid upon, man through some
inadvertence of Nature; on the contrary, this arrangement must be such
as to her seemed altogether suitable, and, if suitable, economical.
Eager men, however, avaricious of performance, do not always regard it
with entire complacency. Especially have the saints been apt to set up
a controversy with Nature in this particular, submitting with infinite
unwillingness to the law by which they deem themselves, as it were,
defrauded of life and activity in so large measure. In form, to be
sure, their accusation lies solely against themselves; they reproach
themselves with sleeping beyond need, sleeping for the mere luxury and
delight of it; but the venial self-deception is quite obvious,—nothing
plainer than that it is their necessity itself which is repugnant to
them, and that their wills are blamed for not sufficiently withstanding
and thwarting it. Pious William Law, for example, is unable to disparage
sleep enough for his content. "The poorest, dullest refreshment of the
body," he calls it,… "such a dull, stupid state of existence, that
even among animals we despise them most which are most drowsy."
You should therefore, so he urges, "begin the day in the spirit of
renouncing sleep." Baxter, also,—at that moment a walking catalogue
and epitome of all diseases,—thought himself guilty for all sleep he
enjoyed beyond three hours a day. More's Utopians were to rise at very
early hours, and attend scientific lectures before breakfast.
Ambition and cupidity, which, in their way, are no whit less earnest and
self-sacrificing than sanctity, equally look upon sleep as a wasteful
concession to bodily wants, and equally incline to limit such concession
to its mere minimum. Commonplaces accordingly are perpetually
circulating in the newspapers, especially in such as pretend to a
didactic tone, wherein all persons are exhorted to early rising, to
resolute abridgment of the hours of sleep, and the like. That Sir Walter
Raleigh slept but five hours in twenty-four; that John Hunter, Frederick
the Great, and Alexander von Humboldt slept but four; that the Duke of
Wellington made it an invariable rule to "turn out" whenever he felt
inclined to turn over, and John Wesley to arise upon his first awaking:
instances such as these appear on parade with the regularity of militia
troops at muster; and the precept duly follows,—"Whoso would not be
insignificant, let him go and do likewise." "All great men have been
early risers," says my newspaper.
Of late, indeed, a better knowledge of the laws of health, or perhaps
only a keener sense of its value and its instability, begins to
supersede these rash inculcations; and paragraphs due to some discreet
Dr. Hall make the rounds of the press, in which we are reminded that
early rising, in order to prove a benefit, rather than a source of
mischief, must be duly matched with early going to bed. The one, we are
told, will by no means answer without the other. As yet, however, this
is urged upon hygienic grounds alone; it is a mere concession to the
body, a bald necessity that we hampered mortals lie under; which
necessity we are quite at liberty to regret and accuse, though we cannot
with safety resist it. Sleep is still admitted to be a waste of time,
though one with which Nature alone is chargeable. And I own, not without
reluctance, that the great authority of Plato can be pleaded for this
low view of its functions. In the "Laws" he enjoins a due measure
thereof, but for the sake of health alone, and adds, that the sleeper
is, for the time, of no more value than the dead. Clearly, mankind would
sustain some loss of good sense, were all the dullards and fat-wits
taken away; and Sancho Panza, with his hearty, "Blessings on the man
that invented sleep!" here ekes out the scant wisdom of sages. The
talking world, however, of our day takes part with the Athenian against
the Manchegan philosopher, and, while admitting the present necessity of
sleep, does not rejoice in its original invention. If, accordingly, in a
computation of the length of man's life, the hours passed in slumber are
carefully deducted, and considered as forming no part of available time,
not even the medical men dispute the justice of such procedure. They
have but this to say:—"The stream of life is not strong enough to keep
the mill of action always going; we must therefore periodically shut
down the gate and allow the waters to accumulate; and he ever loses more
than he gains who attempts any avoidance of this natural necessity."
As medical men, they are not required, perhaps, to say more; and we will
be grateful to them for faithfully urging this,—especially when we
consider, that, under the sage arrangements now existing, all that the
physician does for the general promotion of health is done in defiance
of his own interests. We, however, have further questions to ask. Why is
not the life-stream more affluent? Sleep is needful,—but wherefore?
The physician vindicates the sleeper; but the philosopher must vindicate
Nature.
It is surely one step toward an elucidation of this matter to observe
that the necessity here accused is not one arbitrarily laid upon us by
Nature, but one existing in Nature herself, and appertaining to the
very conception of existence. The elucidation, however, need not pause
at this point. The assumption that sleep is a piece of waste, as being a
mere restorative for the body, and not a service or furtherance to the
mind,—this must be called in question and examined closely; for it is
precisely in this assumption, as I deem, that the popular judgment goes
astray. Is sleep any such arrest and detention of the mind? That it is
a shutting of those outward gates by which impressions flow in upon the
soul is sufficiently obvious; but who can assure us that it is equally
a closing of those inward and skyward gates through which come
the reinforcements of faculty, the strength that masters and uses
impression? I persuade myself, on the contrary, that it is what Homer
called it, divine,—able, indeed, to bring the blessing of a god; and
that hours lawfully passed under the pressure of its heavenly palms are
fruitful, not merely negatively, but positively, not only as recruiting
exhausted powers, and enabling us to be awake again, but by direct
contribution to the resources of the soul and the uses of life; that, in
fine, one awakes farther on in life, as well as farther on in time,
than he was at falling asleep. This deeper function of the night, what
is it?
Sleep is, first of all, a filter, or sieve. It strains off the
impressions that engross, but not enrich us,—that superfluous
material of experience which, either from glutting excess, or from
sheer insignificance, cannot be spiritualized, made human, transmuted
into experience itself. Every man in our day, according to the measure
of his sensibility, and with some respect also to his position, is
mobbed by impressions, and must fight as for his life, if he escape
being taken utterly captive by them. It is our perpetual peril that
our lives shall become so sentient as no longer to be reflective or
artistic,—so beset and infested by the immediate as to lose all
amplitude, all perspective, and to become mere puppets of the present,
mere Chinese pictures, a huddle of foreground without horizon, or
heaven, or even earthly depth and reach. It is easy to illustrate this
miserable possibility. A man, for example, in the act of submitting
to the extraction of a tooth, is, while the process lasts, one of the
poorest poor creatures with whose existence the world might be taunted.
His existence is but skin-deep, and contracted to a mere point at that:
no vision and faculty divine, no thoughts that wander through eternity,
now: a tooth, a jaw, and the iron of the dentist,—these constitute, for
the time being, his universe. Only when this monopolizing, enslaving,
sensualizing impression has gone by, may what had been a point of pained
and quivering animality expand once more to the dimensions of a human
soul. Kant, it is said, could withdraw his attention from the pain of
gout by pure mental engagement, but found the effort dangerous to
his brain, and accordingly was fain to submit, and be no more than
a toe-joint, since evil fate would have it so. These extreme cases
exemplify a process of impoverishment from which we all daily suffer.
The external, the immediate, the idiots of the moment, telling tales
that signify nothing, yet that so overcry the suggestion of our deeper
life as by the sad and weary to be mistaken for the discourse of life
itself,—these obtrude themselves upon us, and multiply and brag and
brawl about us, until we have neither room for better guests, nor
spirits for their entertainment. We are like schoolboys with eyes out at
the windows, drawn by some rattle of drum and squeak of fife, who would
study, were they but deaf. Reproach sleep as a waste, forsooth! It is
this tyrannical attraction to the surface, that indeed robs us of time,
and defrauds us of the uses of life. We cannot hear the gods for the
buzzing of flies. We are driven to an idle industry,—the idlest of all
things.
And to this description of loss men are nowadays peculiarly exposed.
The modern world is all battle-field; the smoke, the dust, the din fill
every eye and ear; and the hill-top of Lucretius, where is it? The
indispensable, terrible newspaper, with its late allies, the Titans and
sprites of steam and electricity,—bringing to each retired nook,
and thrusting in upon each otherwise peaceful household, the crimes,
follies, fears, solicitudes, doubts, problems of all kingdoms and
peoples,—exasperates the former Scotch mist of impressions into a
flooding rain, and almost threatens to swamp the brain of mankind. The
incitement to thought is ever greater; but the possibility of thinking,
especially of thinking in a deep, simple, central way, is ever less.
Problems multiply, but how to attend to them is ever a still greater
problem. Guests of the intellect and imagination accumulate until the
master of the house is pushed out of doors, and hospitality ceases from
the mere excess of its occasion. That must be a greater than Homer who
should now do Homer's work. He, there in his sweet, deep-skied Ionia,
privileged with an experience so simple and yet so salient and powerful,
might well hope to act upon this victoriously by his spirit, might hope
to transmute it, as indeed he did, into melodious and enduring human
suggestion. Would it have been all the same, had he lived in our
type-setting modern world, with its multitudinous knowledges, its
aroused conscience, its spurred and yet thwarted sympathies, its new
incitements to egotism also, and new tools and appliances for egotism
to use,—placed, as it were, in the focus of a vast whispering-gallery,
where all the sounds of heaven and earth came crowding, contending,
incessant upon his ear? One sees at a glance how the serious thought and
poetry of Greece cling to a few master facts, not being compelled to
fight always with the many-headed monster of detail; and this suggests
to me that our literature may fall short of Grecian amplitude, depth,
and simplicity, not wholly from inferiority of power, but from
complications appertaining to our position.
The problem of our time is, How to digest and assimilate the Newspaper?
To complain of it, to desire its abolition, is an anachronism of the
will: it is to complain that time proceeds, and that events follow each
other in due sequence. It is hardly too bold to say that the newspaper
is the modern world, as distinct from the antique and the mediaeval.
It represents, by its advent, that epoch in human history wherein
each man must begin, in proportion to his capability of sympathy and
consideration, to collate his private thoughts, fortunes, interests with
those of the human race at large. We are now in the crude openings of
this epoch, fevered by its incidents and demands; and one of its tokens
is a general exhaustion of the nervous system and failure of health,
both here and in Europe,—those of most sensitive spirit, and least
retired and sheltered from the impressions of the time, suffering most.
All this will end, must end, victoriously. In the mean time can we not
somewhat adjust ourselves to this new condition?
One thing we can and must not fail to do: we can learn to understand and
appreciate Rest. In particular, we should build up and reinforce the
powers of the night to offset this new intensity of the day. Such,
indeed, as the day now is has it ever been, though in a less degree:
always it has cast upon men impressions significant, insignificant, and
of an ill significance, promiscuously and in excess; and always sleep
has been the filter of memory, the purifier of experience, providing a
season that follows closely upon the impressions of the day, ere yet
they are too deeply imbedded, in which our deeper life may pluck away
the adhering burrs from its garments, and arise disburdened, clean, and
free. I make no doubt that Death also performs, though in an ampler and
more thorough way, the same functions. It opposes the tyranny of memory.
For were our experience to go on forever accumulating, unwinnowed,
undiminished, every man would sooner or later break down beneath it;
every man would be crushed by his own traditions, becoming a grave to
himself, and drawing the clods over his own head. To relieve us of these
accidental accretions, to give us back to ourselves, is the use,
in part, of that sleep which rounds each day, and of that other
sleep—brief, but how deep!—which rounds each human life.
Accordingly, he who sleeps well need not die so soon,—even as in the
order of Nature he will not. He has that other and rarer half of a good
memory, namely, a good forgetting. For none remembers so ill as he that
remembers all. "A great German scholar affirmed that he knew not what
it was to forget." Better have been born an idiot! An unwashed
memory,—faugh! To us moderns and Americans, therefore, who need
above all things to forget well,—our one imperative want being a
simplification of experience,—to us, more than to all other men, is
requisite, in large measure of benefit, the winnowing-fan of sleep,
sleep with its choices and exclusions, if we would not need the offices
of death too soon.
But a function of yet greater depth and moment remains to be indicated.
Sleep enables the soul not only to shed away that which is foreign,
but to adopt and assimilate whatever is properly its own. Dr. Edward
Johnson, a man of considerable penetration, though not, perhaps, of a
balanced judgment, has a dictum to the effect that the formation of
blood goes on during our waking hours, but the composition of tissue
during those of sleep. I know not upon what grounds of evidence
this statement is made; but one persuades himself that it must be
approximately true of the body, since it is undoubtedly so of the soul.
Under the eye of the sun the fluid elements of character are supplied;
but the final edification takes place beneath the stars. Awake, we
think, feel, act; sleeping, we become. Day feeds our consciousness;
night, out of those stores which action has accumulated, nourishes the
vital unconsciousness, the pure unit of the man. During sleep, the valid
and serviceable experience of the day is drawn inward, wrought upon by
spiritual catalysis, transmitted into conviction, sentiment, character,
life, and made part of that which is to attract and assimilate all
subsequent experience. Who, accordingly, has not awaked to find some
problem already solved with which he had vainly grappled on the
preceding day? It is not merely that in the morning our invigorated
powers work more efficiently, and enable us to reach this solution
immediately after awaking. Often, indeed, this occurs; but there are
also numerous instances—and such alone are in point—wherein the work
is complete before one's awakening: not unfrequently it is by the
energy itself of the new perception that the soft bonds of slumber are
first broken; the soul hails its new dawn with so lusty a cheer,
that its clarion reaches even to the ear of the body, and we are
unconsciously murmuring the echoes of that joyous salute while yet the
iris-hued fragments of our dreams linger about us. The poet in the
morning, if true divine slumber have been vouchsafed him, finds his
mind enriched with sweeter imaginations, the thinker with profounder
principles and wider categories: neither begins the new day where
he left the old, but each during his rest has silently, wondrously,
advanced to fresh positions, commanding the world now from nobler
summits, and beholding around him an horizon beyond that over which
yesterday's sun rose and set. Milton gives us testimony very much in
point:—
"My celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumb'ring."
Thus, in one important sense, is day the servant of night, action the
minister of rest. I fancy, accordingly, that Marcus Antoninus may give
Heraclitus credit for less than his full meaning in saying that "men
asleep are then also laboring"; for he understands him to signify only
that through such the universe is still accomplishing its ends. Perhaps
he meant to indicate what has been here affirmed,—that in sleep one's
personal destiny is still ripening, his true life proceeding.
But if, as the instance which has been under consideration suggests,
these two principles are of equal dignity, it will follow that the
ability to rest profoundly is of no less estimation than the ability to
work powerfully. Indeed, is it not often the condition upon which great
and sustained power of action depends? The medal must have two sides.
"Danton," says Carlyle, "was a great nature that could rest." Were not
the force and terror of his performance the obverse fact? I do not
now mean, however true it would be, to say that without rest physical
resources would fail, and action be enfeebled in consequence; I mean
that the soul which wants the attitude of repose wants the condition of
power. There is a petulant and meddlesome industry which proceeds from
spiritual debility, and causes more; it is like the sleeplessness and
tossing of exhausted nervous patients, which arises from weakness, and
aggravates its occasion. As few things are equally wearisome, so few are
equally wasteful, with a perpetual indistinct sputter of action, whereby
nothing is done and nothing let alone. Half the world breaks out with
action; its performance is cutaneous, of the nature of tetter. Hence is
it that in the world, with such a noise of building, so few edifices are
reared.
We require it as a pledge of the sanity of our condition, and consequent
wholesomeness of our action, that we can withhold our hand, and
leave the world in that of its Maker. No man is quite necessary to
Omnipotence; grass grew before we were born, and doubtless will continue
to grow when we are dead. If we act, let it be because our soul has
somewhat to bring forth, and not because our fingers itch. We have in
these days been emphatically instructed that all speech not rooted in
silence, rooted, that is, in pure, vital, silent Nature, is
poor and unworthy; but we should be aware that action equally
requires this solemn and celestial perspective, this issue out of the
never-trodden, noiseless realms of the soul. Only that which comes from
a divine depth can attain to a divine height.
There is a courage of withholding and forbearing greater than any other
courage; and before this Fate itself succumbs. Wellington won the
Battle of Waterloo by heroically standing still; and every hour of that
adventurous waiting was heaping up significance for the moment when at
length he should cry, "Up, Guards, and at them !" What Cecil said of
Raleigh, "He can toil terribly," has been styled "an electric touch";
but the "masterly inactivity" of Sir James Mackintosh, happily
appropriated by Mr. Calhoun, carries an equal appeal to intuitive sense,
and has already become proverbial. He is no sufficient hero who in the
delays of Destiny, when his way is hedged up and his hope deferred,
cannot reserve his strength and bide his time. The power of acting
greatly includes that of greatly abstaining from action. The leader of
an epoch in affairs should therefore be some Alfred, Bruce, Gustavus
Vasa, Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi, who can wait while the iron of
opportunity heats at the forge of time; and then, in the moment of its
white glow, can so smite as to shape it forever to the uses of mankind.
One should be able not only to wait, but to wait strenuously, sternly,
immovably, rooted in his repose like a mountain oak in the soil; for
it may easily happen that the necessity of refraining shall be most
imperative precisely when, the external pressure toward action is most
vehement. Amid the violent urgency of events, therefore, one should
learn the art of the mariner, who, in time of storm lies to, with sails
mostly furled, until milder gales permit him again to spread sail
and stretch away. With us, as with him, even a fair wind may blow so
fiercely that one cannot safely run before it. There are movements with
whose direction we sympathize, which are yet so ungoverned that we lose
our freedom and the use of our reason in committing ourselves to
them. So the seaman who runs too long before the increasing gale has
thereafter no election; go on he must, for there is death in pausing,
though it be also death to proceed. Learn, therefore, to wait. Is there
not many a one who never arrives at fruit, for no better reason than
that he persists in plucking his own blossoms? Learn to wait. Take time,
with the smith, to raise your arm, if you would deliver a telling blow.
Does it seem wasteful, this waiting? Let us, then, remind ourselves that
excess and precipitation are more than wasteful,—they are directly
destructive. The fire that blazes beyond bounds not warms the house,
but burns it down, and only helps infinitesimally to warm the wide
out-of-doors. Any live snail will out-travel a wrecked locomotive, and
besides will leave no trail of slaughter on its track. Though despatch
be the soul of business, yet he who outruns his own feet comes to the
ground, and makes no despatch,—unless it be of himself. Hurry is the
spouse of Flurry, and the father of Confusion. Extremes meet, and
overaction steadfastly returns to the effect of non-action,—bringing,
however, the seven devils of disaster in its company. The ocean storm
which heaps the waves so high may, by a sufficient increase, blow them
down again; and in no calm is the sea so level as in the extremest
hurricane.
Persistent excess of outward performance works mischief in one of two
directions,—either upon the body or on the soul. If one will not
accommodate himself to this unreasonable quantity by abatement of
quality,—if he be resolute to put love, faith, and imagination into
his labor, and to be alive to the very top of his brain,—then the body
enters a protest, and dyspepsia, palsy, phthisis, insanity, or somewhat
of the kind, ensues. Commonly, however, the tragedy is different from
this, and deeper. Commonly, in these cases, action loses height as it
gains lateral surface; the superior faculties starve, being robbed of
sustenance by this avarice of performance, and consequently of supply,
on the part of the lower,—they sit at second table, and eat of
remainder-crumbs. The delicate and divine sprites, that should bear the
behests of the soul to the will and to the houses of thought in the
brain her intuitions, are crowded out from the streets of the cerebral
cities by the mob and trample of messengers bound upon baser errands;
and thus is the soul deprived of service, and the man of inspiration.
The man becomes, accordingly, a great merchant who values a cent, but
does not value a human sentiment; or a lawyer who can convince a jury
that white is black, but cannot convince himself that white is white,
God God, and the sustaining faiths of great souls more than moonshine.
So if the apple-tree will make too much wood, it can bear no fruit;
during summer it is full of haughty thrift, but the autumn, which brings
grace to so many a dwarfed bush and low shrub, shows it naked and in
shame.
How many mistake the crowing of the cock for the rising of the sun,
albeit the cock often crows at midnight, or at the moon's rising, or
only at the advent of a lantern and a tallow candle! And yet what
a bloated, gluttonous devourer of hopes and labors is this same
precipitation! All shores are strown with wrecks of barks that went too
soon to sea. And if you launch even your well-built ship at half-tide,
what will it do but strike bottom, and stick there? The perpetual
tragedy of literary history, in especial, is this. What numbers of young
men, gifted with great imitative quickness, who, having, by virtue of
this, arrived at fine words and figures of speech, set off on their
nimble rhetorical Pegasus, keep well out of the Muse's reach ever
after! How many go conspicuously through life, snapping their smart
percussion-caps upon empty barrels, because, forsooth, powder and ball
do not come of themselves, and it takes time to load!
I know that there is a divine impatience, a rising of the waters of love
and noble pain till they must overflow, with or without the hope of
immediate apparent use, and no matter what swords and revenges impend.
History records a few such defeats which are worth thousands of ordinary
victories. Yet the rule is, that precipitation comes of levity.
Eagerness is shallow. Haste is but half-earnest. If an apple is found
to grow mellow and seemingly ripe much before its fellows on the same
bough, you will probably discover, upon close inspection, that there is
a worm in it.
To be sure, any time is too soon with those who dote upon Never. There
are such as find Nature precipitate and God forward. They would have
effect limp at untraversable distances behind cause; they would keep
destiny carefully abed and feed it upon spoon-victual. They play duenna
to the universe, and are perpetually on the qui vive, lest it escape,
despite their care, into improprieties. The year is with them too fast
by so much as it removes itself from the old almanac. The reason is that
they are the old almanac. Or, more distinctly, they are at odds with
universal law, and, knowing that to them it can come only as judgment
and doom, they, not daring to denounce the law itself, fall to the trick
of denouncing its agents as visionaries, and its effects as premature.
The felon always finds the present an unseasonable day on which to be
hanged: the sheriff takes another view of the matter.
But the error of these consists, not in realizing good purposes too
slowly and patiently, but in failing effectually to purpose good at
all. To those who truly are making it the business of their lives to
accomplish worthy aims, this counsel cannot come amiss,—TAKE TIME.
Take a year in which to thread a needle, rather than go dabbing at the
texture with the naked thread. And observe, that there is an excellence
and an efficacy of slowness, no less than of quickness. The armadillo
is equally secure of his prey with the hawk or leopard; and Sir Charles
Bell mentions a class of thieves in India, who, having, through
extreme patience and command of nerve, acquired the power of motion
imperceptibly slow, are the most formidable of all peculators, and
almost defy precaution. And to leave these low instances, slowness
produced by profoundness of feeling and fineness of perception
constitutes that divine patience of genius without which genius does not
exist. Mind lingers where appetite hurries on; it is only the Newtons
who stay to meditate over the fall of an apple, too trivial for the
attention of the clown. It is by this noble slowness that the highest
minds faintly emulate that inconceivable deliberateness and delicacy of
gradation with which solar systems are built and worlds habilitated.
Now haste and intemperance are the Satans that beset virtuous Americans.
And these mischiefs are furthered by those who should guard others
against them. The Rev. Dr. John Todd, in a work, not destitute of merit,
entitled "The Student's Manual," urges those whom he addresses to study,
while about it, with their utmost might, crowding into an hour as much
work as it can possibly be made to contain; so, he says, they will
increase the power of the brain. But this is advice not fit to be given
to a horse, much less to candidates for the graces of scholarly manhood.
I read that race-horses, during the intervals between their public
contests, are permitted only occasionally and rarely to be driven at
their extreme speed, but are assiduously made to walk several hours
each day. By this constancy of moderate exercise they preserve health
and suppleness of limb, without exhaustion of strength. And it appears,
that, were such an animal never to be taken from the stable but to be
pushed to the top of his speed, he would be sure to make still greater
speed toward ruin. Why not be as wise for men as for horses?
And here I desire to lay stress upon one point, which American students
will do well to consider gravely,—It is a PURE, not a strained and
excited, attention which has signal prosperity. Distractions, tempests,
and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the
overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,—these are
they which thwart study and bring it to nought. Nor these only, but all
impatience, all violent eagerness, all passionate and perturbed feeling,
fill the brain with thick and hot blood, suited to the service of
desire, unfit for the uses of thought. Intellect can be served only by
the finest properties of the blood; and if there be any indocility
of soul, any impurity of purpose, any coldness or carelessness, any
prurience or crude and intemperate heat, then base spirits are sent down
from the seat of the soul to summon the sanguineous forces; and these
gather a crew after their own kind. Purity of attention, then, is the
magic that the scholar may use; and let him know, that, the purer it is,
the more temperate, tranquil, reposeful. Truth is not to be run down
with fox-hounds; she is a divinity, and divinely must he draw nigh who
will gain her presence. Go to, thou bluster-brain! Dost thou think to
learn? Learn docility first, and the manners of the skies. And thou
egotist, thinkest thou that these eyes of thine, smoky with the fires of
diseased self-love, and thronged with deceiving wishes, shall perceive
the essential and eternal? They shall see only silver and gold, houses
and lands, reputes, supremacies, fames, and, as instrumental to these,
the forms of logic and seemings of knowledge. If thou wilt discern the
truth, desire IT, not its accidents and collateral effects. Rest in the
pursuit of it, putting simplicity of quest in the place of either
force or wile; and such quest cannot be unfruitful.
Let the student, then, shun an excited and spasmodic tension of brain,
and he will gain more while expending less. It is not toil, it is morbid
excitement, that kills; and morbid excitement in constant connection
with high mental endeavor is, of all modes and associations of
excitement, the most disastrous. Study as the grass grows, and your old
age—and its laurels—shall be green.
Already, however, we are trenching upon that more intimate relationship
of the great opposites under consideration which has been designated
Rest in Motion. More intimate relationship, I say,—at any rate,
more subtile, recondite, difficult of apprehension and exposition, and
perhaps, by reason of this, more central and suggestive. An example
of this in its physical aspect may be seen in the revolutions of the
planets, and in all orbital or circular motion. For such, it will be
at once perceived, is, in strictness of speech, fixed and stationary
motion: it is, as Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated, an exact and equal
obedience, in the same moment, to the law of fixity and the law of
progression. Observe especially, that it is not, like merely retarded
motion, a partial neutralization of each principle by the other, an
imbecile Aristotelian compromise and half-way house between the two;
but it is at once, and in virtue of the same fact, perfect Rest and
perfect Motion. A revolving body is not hindered, but the same impulse
which begot its movement causes this perpetually to return into itself.
Now the principles that are seen to govern the material universe are
but a large-lettered display of those that rule in perfect humanity.
Whatsoever makes distinguished order and admirableness in Nature makes
the same in man; and never was there a fine deed that was not begot of
the same impulse and ruled by the same laws to which solar systems are
due. I desire, accordingly, here to take up and emphasize the statement
previously made in a general way,—that the secret of perfection in
all that appertains to man—in morals, manners, art, politics—must
be sought in such a correspondence and reciprocation of these great
opposites as the motions of the planets perfectly exemplify.
It must not, indeed, be overlooked or unacknowledged, that the planets
do not move in exact circles, but diverge slightly into ellipses. The
fact is by no means without significance, and that of an important kind.
Pure circular motion is the type of perfection in the universe as
a whole, but each part of the whole will inevitably express its
partiality, will acknowledge its special character, and upon the
frankness of this confession its comeliness will in no small degree
depend; nevertheless, no sooner does the eccentricity, or individuality,
become so great as to suggest disloyalty to the idea of the whole,
than ugliness ensues. Thus, comets are portents, shaking the faith of
nations, not supporting it, like the stars. So among men. Nature is
at pains to secure divergence, magnetic variation, putting into every
personality and every powerful action some element of irregularity
and imperfection; and her reason for doing so is, that irregularity
appertains to the state of growth, and is the avenue of access to higher
planes and broader sympathies; still, as the planets, though not moving
in perfect circles, yet come faithfully round to the same places, and
accomplish the ends of circular motion, so in man, the divergence must
be special, not total, no act being the mere arc of a circle, and yet
revolution being maintained. And to the beauty of characters and
deeds, it is requisite that they should never seem even to imperil
fealty to the universal idea. Revolution perfectly exact expresses only
necessity, not voluntary fidelity; but departure, still deferential to
the law of the whole, in evincing freedom elevates its obedience
into fealty and noble faithfulness: by this measure of eccentricity,
centricity is not only emphasized, but immeasurably exalted.
But having made this full and willing concession to the element of
individuality in persons and of special character in actions, we are at
liberty to resume the general thesis,—that orbital rest of movement
furnishes the type of perfect excellence, and suggests accordingly the
proper targe of aspiration and culture.
In applying this law, we will take first a low instance, wherein the
opposite principles stand apart, rather upon terms of outward covenant,
or of mere mixture, than of mutual assimilation. Man is infinite;
men are finite: the purest aspect of great laws never appears in
collections and aggregations, yet the same laws rule here as in the
soul, and such excellence as is possible issues from the same sources.
As an instance, accordingly, of that ruder reciprocation which may
obtain among multitudes, I name the Roman Legion.
It is said that the success of the armies of Rome is not fully accounted
for, until one takes into account the constitution of this military
body. It united, in an incomparable degree, the different advantages
of fixity and fluency. Moderate in size, yet large enough to give the
effect of mass, open in texture, yet compact in form, it afforded to
every man room for individual prowess, while it left no man to his
individual strength. Each soldier leaned and rested upon the Legion,
a body of six thousand men; yet around each was a space in which his
movements might be almost as free, rapid, and individual as though he
had possessed the entire field to himself. The Macedonian Phalanx was a
marvel of mass, but it was mass not penetrated with mobility; it could
move, indeed could be said to have an existence, only as a whole;
its decomposed parts were but débris. The Phalanx, therefore, was
terrible, the constituent parts of it imbecile; and the Battle of
Cynocephalae finally demonstrated its inferiority, for the various
possible exigencies of battle, to the conquering Legion. The brave
rabble of Gauls and Goths, on the other hand, illustrated all that
private valor, not reposing upon any vaster and more stable strength,
has power to achieve; but these rushing torrents of prowess dashed
themselves into vain spray upon the coordinated and reposing courage of
Rome.
The same perpetual opposites must concur to produce the proper form and
uses of the State,—though they here appear in a much more elevated
form. Rest is here known as Law, motion as Liberty. In the true
commonwealth, these, so far from being mutually destructive or
antagonistic, incessantly beget and vivify each other; so that Law
is the expression and guaranty of Freedom, while Freedom flows
spontaneously into the forms of Justice. Neither of these can exist,
neither can be properly conceived of, apart from its correlative
opposite. Nor will any condition of mere truce, or of mere mechanical
equilibrium, suffice. Nothing suffices but a reciprocation so active and
total that each is constantly resolving itself into the other.
The notion of Rousseau, which is countenanced by much of the
phraseology, to say the least, of the present day, was, indeed, quite
contrary to this. He assumed freedom to exist only where law is not,
that is, in the savage state, and to be surrendered, piece for piece,
with every acknowledgment of social obligation. Seldom was ever so
plausible a doctrine equally false. Law is properly the public
definition of freedom and the affirmation of its sacredness and
inviolability as so defined; and only in the presence of it, either
express or implicit, does man become free. Duty and privilege are one
and the same, however men may set up a false antagonism between them;
and accordingly social obligation can subtract nothing from the
privilege and prerogative of liberty. Consequently, the freedom which is
defined as the negation of social duty and obligation is not true regal
freedom, but is that worst and basest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of
pure egotism, masked in the semblance of its divine contrary. That,
be it observed, is the freest society, in which the noblest and most
delicate human powers find room and secure respect,—wherein the
loftiest and costliest spiritualities are most invited abroad by
sympathetic attraction. Now among savages little obtains appreciation,
save physical force and its immediate allies: the divine fledglings of
the human soul, instead of being sweetly drawn and tempted forth, are
savagely menaced, rudely repelled; whatsoever is finest in the man,
together with the entire nature of woman, lies, in that low temperature,
enchained and repressed, like seeds in a frozen soil. The harsh,
perpetual contest with want and lawless rivalry, to which all
uncivilized nations are doomed, permits only a few low powers, and those
much the same in all,—lichens, mosses, rude grasses, and other coarse
cryptogamous growths,—to develop themselves; since these alone can
endure the severities of season and treatment to which all that would
clothe the fields of the soul must remain exposed. Meanwhile the utmost
of that wicked and calamitous suppression of faculty, which constitutes
the essence and makes the tragedy of human slavery, is equally effected
by the inevitable isolation and wakeful trampling and consequent
barrenness of savage life. Liberty without law is not liberty; and the
converse may be asserted with like confidence.
Where, then, the fixed term, State, or Law, and the progressive term,
Person, or Freewill, are in relations of reciprocal support and mutual
reproduction, there alone is freedom, there alone public order. We were
able to command this truth from the height of our general proposition,
and closer inspection shows those anticipations to have been correct.
But man is greater than men; and for the finest aspect of high laws, we
must look to individual souls, not to masses.
What is the secret of noble manners? Orbital action, always returning
into and compensating itself. The gentleman, in offering his respect to
others, offers an equal, or rather the same, respect to himself; and his
courtesies may flow without stint or jealous reckoning, because they
feed their source, being not an expenditure, but a circulation.
Submitting to the inward law of honor and the free sense of what befits
a man,—to a law perpetually made and spontaneously executed in his
own bosom, the instant flowering of his own soul,—he commands his own
obedience, and he obeys his own commanding. Though throned above all
nations, a king of kings, yet the faithful humble vassal of his own
heart; though he serve, yet regal, doing imperial service; he escapes
outward constraint by inward anticipation; and all that could he rightly
named as his duty to others, he has, ere demand, already discovered, and
engaged in, as part of his duty to himself. Now it is the expression of
royal freedom in loyal service, of sovereignty in obedience, courage in
concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble. Low
may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an
elevated and ascending heart: there is nothing loftier, nothing less
allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness. The worm, because
it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may
kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension. Only a
great pride, that is, a great and reverential repose in one's own being,
renders possible a noble humility, which is a great and reverential
acknowledgment of the being of others; this humility in turn sustains a
higher self-reverence; this again resolves itself into a more majestic
humility; and so run, in ever enhancing wave, the great circles of
inward honor and outward grace. And without this self-sustaining
return of the action into itself, each quality feeding itself from its
correlative opposite, there can be no high behavior. This is the reason
why qualities loftiest in kind and largest in measure are vulgarly
mistaken, not for their friendly opposites, but for their mere
contraries,—why a very profound sensibility, a sensibility, too,
peculiarly of the spirit, not of nerve only, is sure to be named
coldness, as Mr. Ruskin recently remarks,—why vast wealth of good
pride, in its often meek acceptance of wrong, in its quiet ignoring
of insult, in its silent superiority to provocation, passes with
the superficial and petulant for poverty of pride and mere
mean-spiritedness,—why a courage which is not partial, but total,
coexisting, as it always does, with a noble peacefulness, with a noble
inaptness for frivolous hazards, and a noble slowness to take offence,
is, in its delays and forbearances, thought by the half-courageous to
be no better than cowardice;—it is, as we have said, because great
qualities revolve and repose in orbits of reciprocation with their
opposites, which opposites are by coarse and ungentle eyes misdeemed to
be contraries. Feeling transcendently deep and powerful is unimpassioned
and far lower-voiced than indifference and unfeelingness, being wont
to express itself, not by eloquent ebullition, but by extreme
understatement, or even by total silence. Sir Walter Raleigh, when at
length he found himself betrayed to death—and how basely betrayed!—by
Sir Lewis Stukely, only said, "Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn to
your credit." The New Testament tells us of a betrayal yet more quietly
received. These are instances of noble manners.
What actions are absolutely moral is determined by application of the
same law,—those only which repose wholly in themselves, being to
themselves at once motive and reward. "Miserable is he," says the
"Bhagavad Gita," "whose motive to action lies, not in the action itself,
but in its reward." Duty purchased with covenant of special delights is
not duty, but is the most pointed possible denial of it. The just man
looks not beyond justice; the merciful reposes in acts of mercy; and
he who would be bribed to equity and goodness is not only bad, but
shameless. But of this no further words.
Rest is sacred, celestial, and the appreciation of it and longing for
it are mingled with the religious sentiment of all nations. I cannot
remember the time when there was not to me a certain ineffable
suggestion in the apostolic words, "There remaineth, therefore, a rest
for the people of God." But the repose of the godlike must, as that of
God himself, be infinitely removed from mere sluggish inactivity;
since the conception of action is the conception of existence
itself,—that is, of Being in the act of self-manifestation. Celestial
rest is found in action so universal, so purely identical with the great
circulations of Nature, that, like the circulation of the blood and the
act of breathing, it is not a subtraction from vital resource, but is,
on the contrary, part of the very fact of life and all its felicities.
This does not exclude rhythmic or recreative rest; but the need of such
rest detracts nothing from pleasure or perfection. In heaven also, if
such figure of speech be allowable, may be that toil which shall render
grateful the cessation from toil, and give sweetness to sleep; but right
weariness has its own peculiar delight, no less than right exercise;
and as the glories of sunset equal those of dawn, so with equal, though
diverse pleasure, should noble and temperate labor take off its sandals
for evening repose, and put them on to go forth "beneath the opening
eyelids of the morn." Yet, allowing a place for this rhythm in the
detail and close inspection even of heavenly life, it still holds true
on the broad scale, that pure beauty and beatitude are found there only
where life and character sweep in orbits of that complete expression
which is at once divine labor and divine repose.
Observe, now, that this rest-motion, as being without waste or loss, is
a manifested immortality, since that which wastes not ends not; and
therefore it puts into every motion the very character and suggestion of
immortal life. Yea, one deed rightly done, and the doer is in heaven,
—is of the company of immortals. One deed so done that in it is no
mortality; and in that deed the meaning of man's history,—the meaning,
indeed, and the glory, of existence itself,—are declared. Easy,
therefore, it is to see how any action may be invested with universal
significance and the utmost conceivable charm. The smaller the realm and
the humbler the act into which this amplitude and universality of spirit
are carried, the more are they emphasized and set off; so that, without
opportunity of unusual occasion, or singular opulence of natural power,
a man's life may possess all that majesty which the imagination pictures
in archangels and in gods. Indeed, it is but simple statement of fact to
say, that he who rests utterly in his action shall belittle not only
whatsoever history has recorded, but all which that poet of poets,
Mankind, has ever dreamed or fabled of grace and greatness. He shall
not peer about with curiosity to spy approbation, or with zeal to defy
censure; he shall not know if there be a spectator in the world; his
most public deed shall be done in a divine privacy, on which no eye
intrudes,—his most private in the boundless publicities of Nature; his
deed, when done, falls away from him, like autumn apples from their
boughs, no longer his, but the world's and destiny's; neither the
captive of yesterday nor the propitiator of to-morrow, he abides simply,
majestically, like a god, in being and doing. Meanwhile, blame and
praise whirl but as unrecognized cloudlets of gloom or glitter beneath
his feet, enveloping and often blinding those who utter them, but to him
never attaining.
It is not easy at present to suggest the real measure and significance
of such manhood, because this age has debased its imagination, by the
double trick, first, of confounding man with his body, and next, of
considering the body, not as a symbol of truth, but only as an agent in
the domain of matter,—comparing its size with the sum total of physical
space, and its muscular power with the sum total of physical forces. Yet
"What know we greater than the soul?"
A man is no outlying province, nor does any province lie beyond him.
East, West, North, South, and height and depth are contained in his
bosom, the poles of his being reaching more widely, his zenith and nadir
being more sublime and more profound. We are cheated by nearness and
intimacy. Let us look at man with a telescope, and we shall find no star
or constellation of sweep so grand, no nebulae or star-dust so provoking
and suggestive to fancy. In truth, there are no words to say how either
large or small, how significant or insignificant, men may be. Though
solar and stellar systems amaze by their grandeur of scale, yet is true
manhood the maximum of Nature; though microscopic and sub-microscopic
protophyta amaze by their inconceivable littleness, yet is mock manhood
Nature's minimum. The latter is the only negative quantity known to
Nature; the former the only revelation of her entire heart.
In concluding, need I say that only the pure can repose in his
action,—only he obtain deliverance by his deed, and after deliverance
from it? The egotism, the baseness, the partialities that are in our
performance are hooks and barbs by which it wounds and wearies us in the
passage, and clings to us being past.
Law governs all; no favor is shown; the event is as it must be; only he
who has no blinding partiality toward himself, who is whole and one with
the whole, he who is Nature and Law and divine Necessity, can be blest
with that blessedness which Nature is able to give only by her presence.
There is a labor and a rest that are the same, one fact, one felicity;
in this are power, beauty, immortality; by existence as a whole it is
always perfectly exemplified; to man, as the eye of existence, it is
also possible; but it is possible to him only as he is purely man,—only
as he abandons himself to the divine principles of his life: in other
words, this Sabbath remaineth in very deed to no other than the people
of God.
* * * * *
At the opening of the present century, the Lake District of Cumberland
and Westmoreland was groaned over by some residents as fast losing its
simplicity. The poet Gray had been the first to describe its natural
features in an express manner; and his account of the views above
Keswick and Grasmere was quoted, sixty years since, as evidence of
the spoiling process which had gone on since the introduction of
civilization from the South. Gray remarked on the absence of red roofs,
gentlemen's houses, and garden-walls, and on the uniform character of
the humble farmsteads and gray cottages under their sycamores in the
vales. Wordsworth heard and spoke a good deal of the innovations which
had modified the scene in the course of the thirty years which elapsed
between Gray's visits (in 1767-69) and his own settlement in the Lake
District; but he lived to say more, at the end of half a century, of the
wider and deeper changes which time had wrought in the aspect of the
country and the minds and manners of the people. According to his
testimony, and that of Southey, the barbarism was of a somewhat gross
character at the end of the last century; the magistrates were careless
of the condition of the society in which they bore authority; the clergy
were idle or worse,—"marrying and burying machines," as Southey told
Wilberforce; and the morality of the people, such as it was, was
ascribed by Wordsworth, in those his days of liberalism in politics, to
the state of republican equality in which they lived. Excellent, fussy
Mr. Wilberforce thought, when he came for some weeks into the District,
that the Devil had had quite time enough for sowing tares while the
clergy were asleep; so he set to work to sow a better seed; and we find
in his diary that he went into house after house "to talk religion to
the people." I do not know how he was received; but at this day the
people are puzzled at that kind of domestic intervention, so unsuitable
to their old-fashioned manners,—one old dame telling with wonder, some
little time since, that a young lady had called and sung a hymn to
her, but had given her nothing at the end for listening. The rough
independence of the popular manners even now offends persons of a
conventional habit of mind; and when poets and philosophers first came
from southern parts to live here, the democratic tone of feeling and
behavior was more striking than it is now or will ever be again.
Before the Lake poets began to give the public an interest in the
District, some glimpses of it were opened by the well-known literary
ladies of the last century who grouped themselves round their young
favorite, Elizabeth Smith. I do not know whether her name and fame have
reached America; but in my young days she was the English school-girls'
subject of admiration and emulation. She had marvellous powers of
acquisition, and she translated the Book of Job, and a good deal from
the German,—introducing Klopstock to us at a time when we hardly knew
the most conspicuous names in German literature. Elizabeth Smith was an
accomplished girl in all ways. There is a damp, musty-looking house,
with small windows and low ceilings, at Coniston, where she lived with
her parents and sister, for some years before her death. We know, from
Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton's and the Bowdlers' letters, how Elizabeth and
her sister lived in the beauty about them, rambling, sketching, and
rowing their guests on the lake. In one of her rambles, Elizabeth sat
too long under a heavy dew. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, which
never left her, and died in rapid decline. Towards the last she was
carried out daily from the close and narrow rooms at home, and laid in a
tent pitched in a field just across the road, whence she could overlook
the lake, and the range of mountains about its head. On that spot now
stands Tent Lodge, the residence of Tennyson and his bride after their
marriage. One of my neighbors, who first saw the Lake District in early
childhood, has a solemn remembrance of the first impression. The tolling
of the bell of Hawkeshead church was heard from afar; and it was tolling
for the funeral of Elizabeth Smith. Her portrait is before me now,—the
ingenuous, child-like face, with the large dark eyes which alone show
that it is not the portrait of a child. It was through her that a large
proportion of the last generation of readers first had any definite
associations with Coniston.
Wordsworth had, however, been in that church many a time, above twenty
years before, when at Hawkeshead school. He used to tell that his mother
had praised him for going into the church, one week-day, to see a woman
do penance in a white sheet. She considered it good for his morals. But
when he declared himself disappointed that nobody had given him a penny
for his attendance, as he had somehow expected, his mother told him he
was served right for going to church from such an inducement. He spoke
with gratitude of an usher at that school, who put him in the way
of learning the Latin, which had been a sore trouble at his native
Cockermouth, from unskilful teaching. Our interest in him at that
school, however, is from his having there first conceived the idea of
writing verse. His master set the boys, as a task, to write a poetical
theme,—"The Summer Vacation"; and Master William chose to add to it
"The Return to School." He was then fourteen; and he was to be double
that age before he returned to the District and took up his abode there.
He had meantime gone through his college course, as described in his
Memoirs, and undergone strange conditions of opinion and feeling in
Paris during the Revolution; had lived in Dorsetshire, with his faithful
sister; had there first seen Coleridge, and had been so impressed by the
mind and discourse of that wonderful young philosopher as to remove to
Somersetshire to be near him; had seen Klopstock in Germany, and lived
there for a time; and had passed through other changes of residence and
places, when we find him again among the Lakes in 1779, still with his
sister by his side, and their brother John, and Coleridge, who had never
been in the District before.
As they stood on the margin of Grasmere, the scene was more like what
Gray saw than what is seen at this day. The churchyard was bare of the
yews which now distinguish it,—for Sir George Beaumont had them planted
at a later time; and where the group of kindred and friends—the
Wordsworths and their relatives—now lie, the turf was level and
untouched. The iron rails and indefensible monuments, which Wordsworth
so reprobated half a century later, did not exist. The villas which stud
the slopes, the great inns which bring a great public, were uncreated;
and there was only the old Roman road where the Wishing-Gate is, or the
short cut by the quarries to arrive by from the South, instead of the
fine mail-road which now winds between the hills and the margin of
the lake. John Wordsworth guided his brother and Coleridge through
Grisedale, over a spur of Helvellyn, to see Ullswater; and Coleridge has
left a characteristic testimony of the effect of the scenery upon him.
It was "a day when light and darkness coexisted in contiguous masses,
and the earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her
wildest accidents." He tells how his eyes were dim with tears, and
how imagination and reality blended their objects and impressions.
Wordsworth's account of the same excursion is in as admirable contrast
with Coleridge's as their whole mode of life and expression was, from
first to last. With the carelessness of the popular mind in such cases,
the British public had already almost confounded the two men and their
works, as it soon after mixed up Southey with both; whereas they were
all as unlike each other as any three poets could well be.
Coleridge and Wordsworth were both contemplative, it is true, while
Southey was not: but the remarkable thing about Coleridge was the
exclusiveness of his contemplative tendencies, by which one set of
faculties ran riot in his mind and life, making havoc among his powers,
and a dismal wreck of his existence. The charm and marvel of his
discourse upset all judgments during his life, and for as long as his
voice remained in the ear of his enchanted hearers; but, apart from the
spell, it is clear to all sober and trained thinkers that Coleridge
wandered away from truth and reality in the midst of his vaticinations,
as the clairvoyant does in the midst of his previsions, so as to
mislead and bewilder, while inspiring and intoxicating the hearer or
reader. He recorded, in regard to himself, that "history and particular
facts lost all interest" in his mind after his first launch into
metaphysics; and he remained through life incapable of discerning
reality from inborn images. Wordsworth took alarm at the first
experience of such a tendency in himself, and relates that he used to
catch at the trees and palings by the roadside to satisfy himself of
existences out of himself; but Coleridge encouraged this subjective
exclusiveness, to the destruction of the balance of his mind and the
morale of his nature. He was himself a wild poem; and he discoursed
wild poems to us,—musical romances from Dreamland; but the luxury to
himself and us was bought by injury to others which was altogether
irreparable, and pardonable only on the ground that the balance of his
mind was destroyed by a fatal intellectual, in addition to physical
intemperance. In him we see an extreme case of a life of contemplation
uncontrolled by will and unchecked by action. His faculty of will
perished, and his prerogative of action died out. His contemplations
must necessarily be worth just so much the less to us as his mental
structure was deformed,—extravagantly developed in one direction, and
dwarfed in another.
The singularity in Wordsworth's case, on the other hand, is that his
contemplative tendencies not only coexisted with, but were implicated
with, the most precise and vivid apprehension of small realities. There
was no proportion in his mind; and vaticination and twaddle rolled
off his eloquent tongue as chance would have it. At one time he would
discourse like a seer, on the slightest instigation, by the hour
together; and next, he would hold forth with equal solemnity, on the
pettiest matter of domestic economy. I have known him take up some
casual notice of a "beck" (brook) in the neighborhood, and discourse
of brooks for two hours, till his hearers felt as if they were by the
rivers of waters in heaven; and next, he would talk on and on, till
stopped by some accident, on his doubt whether Mrs. Wordsworth gave a
penny apiece or a half-penny apiece for trapped mice to a little girl
who had undertaken to clear the house of them. It has been common to
regret that he held the office of Stamp-Distributor in the District; but
it was probably a great benefit to his mind as well as his fortunes. It
was something that it gave him security and ease as to the maintenance
of his family; but that is less important than its necessitating a
certain amount of absence from home, and intercourse with men on
business. He was no reader in mature life; and the concentration of his
mind on his own views, and his own genius, and the interests of his home
and neighborhood, caused some foibles, as it was; and it might have been
almost fatal, but for some office which allowed him to gratify his love
of out-door life at the same time that it led him into intercourse
with men in another capacity than as listeners to himself, or peasants
engrossed in their own small concerns.
Southey was not contemplative or speculative, and it could only have
been because he lived at the Lakes and was Coleridge's brother-in-law
that he was implicated with the two speculative poets at all. It has
been carelessly reported by Lake tourists that Southey was not beloved
among his neighbors, while Wordsworth was; and that therefore the latter
was the better man, in a social sense. It should be remembered that
Southey was a working man, and that the other two were not; and,
moreover, it should never be for a moment forgotten that Southey worked
double-tides to make up for Coleridge's idleness. While Coleridge was
dreaming and discoursing, Southey was toiling to maintain Coleridge's
wife and children. He had no time and no attention to spare for
wandering about and making himself at home with the neighbors. This
practice came naturally to Wordsworth; and a kind and valued neighbor he
was to all the peasants round. Many a time I have seen him in the road,
in Scotch bonnet and green spectacles, with a dozen children at his
heels and holding his cloak, while he cut ash-sticks for them from the
hedge, hearing all they had to say or talking to them. Southey, on the
other hand, took his constitutional walk at a fixed hour, often reading
as he went. Two families depended on him; and his duty of daily labor
was not only distinctive, but exclusive. He was always at work at home,
while Coleridge was doing nothing but talking, and Wordsworth was
abroad, without thinking whether he was at work or play. Seen from the
stand-point of conscience and of moral generosity, Southey's was the
noblest life of the three; and Coleridge's was, of course, nought.
I own, however, that, considering the tendency of the time to make
literature a trade, or at least a profession, I cannot help feeling
Wordsworth's to have been the most privileged life of them all. He had
not work enough to do; and his mode of life encouraged an excess of
egoism: but he bore all the necessary retribution of this in his latter
years; and the whole career leaves an impression of an airy freedom and
a natural course of contemplation, combined with social interest and
action, more healthy than the existence of either the delinquent or the
exemplary comrade with whom he was associated in the public view.
I have left my neighbors waiting long on the margin of Grasmere. That
was before I was born; but I could almost fancy I had seen them there.
I observed that Wordsworth's report of their trip was very unlike
Coleridge's. When his sister had left them, he wrote to her, describing
scenes by brief precise touches which draw the picture that Coleridge
blurs with grand phrases. Moreover, Wordsworth tells sister Dorothy that
John will give him forty pounds to buy a bit of land by the lake, where
they may build a cottage to live in henceforth. He says, also, that
there is a small house vacant near the spot.—They took that house;
and thus the Wordsworths became "Lakers." They entered that well-known
cottage at Grasmere on the shortest day (St. Thomas's) of 1799. Many
years afterwards, Dorothy wrote of the aspect of Grasmere on her arrival
that winter evening,—the pale orange lights on the lake, and the
reflection of the mountains and the island in the still waters. She
had wandered about the world in an unsettled way; and now she had cast
anchor for life,—not in that house, but within view of that valley.
All readers of Wordsworth, on either side the Atlantic, believe
that they know that cottage, (described in the fifth book of the
"Excursion,") with its little orchard, and the moss house, and the
tiny terrace behind, with its fine view of the lake and the basin of
mountains. There the brother and sister lived for some years in a very
humble way, making their feast of the beauty about them. Wordsworth was
fond of telling how they had meat only two or three times a week; and he
was eager to impress on new-comers—on me among others—the prudence of
warning visitors that they must make up their minds to the scantiest
fare. He was as emphatic about this, laying his finger on one's arm to
enforce it, as about catching mice or educating the people. It was vain
to say that one would rather not invite guests than fail to provide for
them; he insisted that the expense would be awful, and assumed that his
sister's and his own example settled the matter. I suppose they were
poor in those days; but it was not for long. A devoted sister Dorothy
was. Too late it appeared that she had sacrificed herself to aid and
indulge her brother. When her mind was gone, and she was dying by
inches, Mrs. Wordsworth offered me the serious warning that she gave
whenever occasion allowed, against overwalking. She told me that Dorothy
had, not occasionally only, but often, walked forty miles in a day to
give her brother her presence. To repair the ravages thus caused she
took opium; and the effect on her exhausted frame was to overthrow her
mind. This was when she was elderly. For a long course of years, she
was a rich household blessing to all connected with her. She shared her
brother's peculiarity of investing trifles with solemnity, or rather,
of treating all occasions alike (at least in writing) with pedantic
elaboration; but she had the true poet's, combined with the true woman's
nature; and the fortunate man had, in wife and sister, the two best
friends of his life.
The Wordsworths were the originals of the Lake coterie, as we have
seen. Born at Cockermouth, and a pupil at the Hawkeshead school,
Wordsworth was looking homewards when he settled in the District. The
others came in consequence. Coleridge brought his family to Greta Hall,
near Keswick; and with them came Mrs. Lovell, one of the three Misses
Fricker, of whom Coleridge and Southey had married two. Southey was
invited to visit Greta Hall, the year after the Wordsworths settled at
Grasmere; and thus they became acquainted. They had just met before, in
the South; but they had yet to learn to know each other; and there was
sufficient unlikeness between them to render this a work of some time
and pains. It was not long before Southey, instead of Coleridge, was
the lessee of Greta Hall; and soon after Coleridge took his departure,
leaving his wife and children, and also the Lovells, a charge upon
Southey, who had no more fortune than Coleridge, except in the
inexhaustible wealth of a heart, a will, and a conscience. Wordsworth
married in 1802; and then the two poets passed through their share of
the experience of human life, a few miles apart, meeting occasionally on
some mountain ridge or hidden dale, and in one another's houses, drawn
closer by their common joys and sorrows, but never approximating in
the quality of their genius, or in the stand-points from which they
respectively looked out upon human affairs. They had children, loved
them, and each lost some of them; and they felt tenderly for each other
when each little grave was opened. Southey, the most amiable of men in
domestic life, gentle, generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely
ferocious about politics, as his articles in the "Quarterly Review"
showed all the world. Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and
pettishness, mildly described by himself as "gentle stirrings of the
mind," which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children,
and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic
fever had passed off, grew more and more liberal with advancing years.
I do not mean that he verged towards the Reformers,—but that he became
more enlarged, tolerant, and generally sympathetic in his political
views and temper. It thus happened that society at a distance took up
a wholly wrong impression of the two men,—supposing Southey to be an
ill-conditioned bigot, and Wordsworth a serene philosopher, far above
being disturbed by troubles in daily life, or paying any attention to
party-politics. He showed some of his ever-growing liberality, by the
way, in speaking of this matter of temper. In old age, he said that the
world certainly does get on in minor morals: that when he was young
"everybody had a temper"; whereas now no such thing is allowed;
amiability is the rule; and an imperfect temper is an offence and a
misfortune of a distinctive character.
Among the letters which now and then arrived from strangers, in the
early days of Wordsworth's fame, was one which might have come from
Coleridge, if they had never met. It was full of admiration and
sympathy, expressed as such feelings would be by a man whose analytical
and speculative faculties predominated over all the rest. The writer
was, indeed, in those days, marvellously like Coleridge,—subtile in
analysis to excess, of gorgeous imagination, bewitching discourse, fine
scholarship, with a magnificent power of promising and utter incapacity
in performing, and with the same habit of intemperance in opium. By
his own account, his "disease was to meditate too much and observe too
little." I need hardly explain that this was De Quincey; and when I have
said that, I need hardly explain further that advancing time and closer
acquaintance made the likeness to Coleridge bear a smaller and smaller
proportion to the whole character of the man.
In return for his letter of admiration and sympathy, he received an
invitation to the Grasmere valley. More than once he set forth to avail
himself of it; but when within a few miles, the shyness under which in
those days he suffered overpowered his purpose, and he turned back.
After having achieved the meeting, however, he soon announced his
intention of settling in the valley; and he did so, putting his wife
and children eventually into the cottage which the Wordsworths had now
outgrown and left. There was little in him to interest or attach a
family of regular domestic habits, like the Wordsworths, given to active
employment, sensible thrift, and neighborly sympathy. It was universally
known that a great poem of Wordsworth's was reserved for posthumous
publication, and kept under lock and key meantime. De Quincey had so
remarkable a memory that he carried off by means of it the finest
passage of the poem,—or that which the author considered so; and
he published that passage in a magazine article, in which he gave
a detailed account of the Wordsworths' household, connections, and
friends, with an analysis of their characters and an exhibition of their
faults. This was in 1838, a dozen years before the poet's death. The
point of interest is,—How did the wronged family endure the wrong? They
were quiet about it,—that is, sensible and dignified; but Wordsworth
was more. A friend of his and mine was talking with him over the fire,
just when De Quincey's disclosures were making the most noise, and
mentioned the subject. Wordsworth begged to be spared hearing anything
about them, saying that the man had long passed away from the family
life and mind, and he did not wish to disturb himself about what could
not be remedied. My friend acquiesced, saying, "Well, I will tell you
only one thing that he says, and then we will talk of something else. He
says your wife is too good for you." The old man's dim eyes lighted up
instantly, and he started from his seat, and flung himself against
the mantel-piece, with his back to the fire, as he cried with loud
enthusiasm, "And that's true! There he is right!"
It was by his written disclosures only that De Quincey could do much
mischief; for it was scarcely possible to be prejudiced by anything he
could say. The whole man was grotesque; and it must have been a singular
image that his neighbors in the valley preserved in their memory. A
frail-looking, diminutive man, with narrow chest and round shoulders and
features like those of a dying patient, walking with his hands behind
him, his hat on the back of his head, and his broad lower lip projected,
as if he had something on his tongue that wanted listening to,—such was
his aspect; and if one joined company with him, the strangeness grew
from moment to moment. His voice and its modulations were a perfect
treat. As for what he had to say, it was everything from odd comment on
a passing trifle, eloquent enunciation of some truth, or pregnant
remark on some lofty subject, down to petty gossip, so delivered as to
authorize a doubt whether it might not possibly be an awkward effort
at observing something outside of himself, or at getting a grasp of
something that he supposed actual. That he should have so supposed was
his weakness, and the retribution for the peculiar intemperance which
depraved his nature and alienated from their proper use powers which
should have made him one of the first philosophers of his age. His
singular organization was fatally deranged in its action before it could
show its best quality, and his is one of the cases in which we cannot be
wrong in attributing moral disease directly to physical disturbance; and
it would no doubt have been dropped out of notice, if he had been able
to abstain from comment on the characters and lives of other people.
Justice to them compels us to accept and use the exposures he offers us
of himself.
About the time of De Quincey's settlement at Grasmere, Wilson, the
future CHRISTOPHER NORTH, bought the Elleray estate, on the banks of
Windermere. He was then just of age,—supreme in all manly sports,
physically a model man, and intellectually, brimming with philosophy and
poetry. He came hither a rather spoiled child of fortune, perhaps; but
he was soon sobered by a loss of property which sent him to his studies
for the bar. Scott was an excellent friend to him at that time; and so
strong and prophetic was Wilson's admiration of his patron, that he
publicly gave him the name of "The Great Magician" before the first
"Waverley Novel" was published. Within ten years from his getting a
foothold on Windermere banks, he had raised periodical literature to a
height unknown before in our time, by his contributions to "Blackwood's
Magazine"; and he seemed to step naturally into the Moral Philosophy
Chair in Edinburgh in 1820. Christopher North has perhaps conveyed to
foreign, and untravelled English, readers as true a conception of our
Lake scenery and its influences in one way as Wordsworth in another.
The very spirit of the moorland, lake, brook, tarn, ghyll, and ridge
breathes from his prose poetry: and well it might. He wandered alone for
a week together beside the trout-streams and among the highest tarns. He
spent whole days in his boat, coasting the bays of the lake, or floating
in the centre, or lying reading in the shade of the trees on the
islands. He led with a glorious pride the famous regatta on Windermere,
when Canning was the guest of the Boltons at Storrs, and when Scott,
Wordsworth, and Southey were of the company; and he liked almost as well
steering the packet-boat from Waterhead to Bowness, till the steamer
drove out the old-fashioned conveyance. He sat at the stern,
immovable, with his hand on the rudder, looking beyond the company of
journeymen-carpenters, fish- and butter-women, and tourists, with a
gaze on the water-and-sky-line which never shifted. Sometimes a learned
professor or a brother sportsman was with him; but he spoke no word, and
kept his mouth peremptorily shut under his beard. It was a sight worth
taking the voyage for; and it was worth going a long round to see him
standing on the shore,—"reminding one of the first man, Adam," (as was
said of him,) in his best estate,—the tall, broad frame, large head,
marked features, and long hair; and the tread which shook the ground,
and the voice which roused the echoes afar and made one's heart-strings
vibrate within. These attributes made strangers turn to look at him on
the road, and fixed all eyes on him in the ball-room at Ambleside, when
any local object induced him to be a steward. Every old boatman and
young angler, every hoary shepherd and primitive housewife in the
uplands and dales, had an enthusiasm for him. He could enter into the
solemnity of speculation with Wordsworth while floating at sunset on the
lake; and not the less gamesomely could he collect a set of good fellows
under the lamp at his supper-table, and take off Wordsworth's or
Coleridge's monologues to the life. There was that between them which
must always have precluded a close sympathy; and their faults were just
what each could least allow for in another. Of Wilson's it is enough to
say that Scott's injunction to him to "leave off sack, purge, and live
cleanly," if he wished for the Moral Philosophy Chair, was precisely
what was needed. It was still needed some time after, when, though a
Professor of Moral Philosophy, he was seen, with poor Campbell, leaving
a tavern one morning, in Edinburgh, haggard and red-eyed, hoarse and
exhausted,—not only the feeble Campbell, but the mighty Wilson,—they
having sat together twenty-four hours, discussing poetry and wine with
all their united energies. This sort of thing was not to the taste of
Wordsworth or Southey, any more than their special complacencies were
venerable to the humor of Christopher North. Yet they could cordially
admire one another; and when sorrows came over them, in dreary
impartiality, they could feel reverently and deeply for each other. When
Southey lost his idolized boy, Herbert, and had to watch over his insane
wife, always his dearest friend, and all the dearer for her helpless
and patient suffering under an impenetrable gloom,—when Wordsworth was
bereaved of the daughter who made the brightness of his life in his old
age,—and when Wilson was shaken to the centre by the loss of his wife,
and mourned alone in the damp shades of Elleray, where he would allow
not a twig to be cut from the trees she loved,—the sorrow of each moved
them all. Elleray was a gloomy place then, and Wilson never surmounted
the melancholy which beset him there; and he wisely parted with it
some years before his death. The later depression in his case was in
proportion to the earlier exhilaration. His love of Nature and of genial
human intercourse had been too exuberant; and he became incapable of
enjoyment from either, in his last years. He never recovered from an
attack of pressure on the brain, and died paralyzed in the spring of
1854. He had before gone from among us with his joy; and then we heard
that he had dropped out of life with his griefs; and our beautiful
region, and the region of life, were so much the darker in a thousand
eyes.
While speaking of Elleray, we should pay a passing tribute of gratitude
to an older worthy of that neighborhood,—the well-known Bishop of
Llandaff, Richard Watson, who did more for the beauty of Windermere than
any other person. There is nothing to praise in the damp old mansion
at Calgarth, set down in low ground, and actually with its back to the
lake, and its front windows commanding no view; but the woods are the
glory of Bishop Watson. He was not a happy prelate, believing himself
undervalued and neglected, and fretting his heart over his want of
promotion; but be must have had many a blessed hour while planting
those woods for which many generations will be grateful to him. Let
the traveller remember him, when looking abroad from Miller Brow, near
Bowness. Below lies the whole length of Windermere, from the white
houses of Clappersgate, nestling under Loughrigg at the head, to the
Beacon at the foot. The whole range of both shores, with their bays
and coves and promontories, can be traced; and the green islands are
clustered in the centre; and the whole gradation of edifices is seen,
from Wray Castle, on its rising ground, to the tiny boat-houses, each
on its creek. All these features are enhanced in beauty by the Calgarth
woods, which cover the undulations of hill and margin beneath and
around, rising and falling, spreading and contracting, with green
meadows interposed, down to the white pebbly strand. To my eye, this
view is unsurpassed by any in the District.
Bishop Watson's two daughters were living in the neighborhood till two
years ago,—antique spinsters, presenting us with a most vivid specimen
of the literary female life of the last century. They were excellent
women, differing from the rest of society chiefly in their notion that
superior people should show their superiority in all the acts of their
lives,—that literary people should talk literature, and scientific
people science, and so on; and they felt affronted, as if set down among
common people, when an author talked about common things in a common
way. They did their best to treat their friends to wit and polite
letters; and they expected to be ministered to in the same fashion. This
was rather embarrassing to visitors to whom it had never occurred to
talk for any other purpose than to say what presented itself at the
moment; but it is a privilege to have known those faithful sisters, and
to have seen in them a good specimen of the literary society of the last
century.
There is another spot in that neighborhood which strangers look up to
with interest from the lake itself,—Dovenest, the abode of Mrs. Hemans
for the short time of her residence at the Lakes. She saw it for the
first time from the lake, as her published correspondence tells, and
fell in love with it; and as it was vacant at the time, she went into it
at once. Many of my readers will remember her description of the garden
and the view from it, the terrace, the circular grass-plot with its one
tall white rose-tree. "You cannot imagine," she wrote, in 1830, "how I
delight in that fair, solitary, neglected-looking tree." The tree is not
neglected now. Dovenest is inhabited by Mrs. Hemans's then young friend,
the Rev. R.P. Graves; and it has recovered from the wildness and
desolation of thirty years ago, while looking as secluded as ever among
the woods on the side of Wansfell.
All this time, illustrious strangers were coming, year by year, to visit
residents, or to live among the mountains for a few weeks. There was
Wilberforce, spending part of a summer at Rayrigg, on the lake shore.
One of his boys asked him, "Why should you not buy a house here? and
then we could come every year." The reply was characteristic:—that it
would be very delightful; but that the world is lying, in a manner,
under the curse of God; that we have something else to do than to enjoy
fine prospects; and that, though it may be allowable to taste the
pleasure now and then, we ought to wait till the other life to enjoy
ourselves. Such was the strait-lacing in which the good man was forever
trying to compress his genial, buoyant, and grateful nature.—Scott came
again and again; and Wordsworth and Southey met to do him honor. The
tourist must remember the Swan Inn,—the white house beyond Grasmere,
under the skirts of Helvellyn. There Scott went daily for a glass of
something good, while Wordsworth's guest, and treated with the homely
fare of the Grasmere cottage. One morning, his host, himself, and
Southey went up to the Swan, to start thence with ponies for the ascent
of Helvellyn. The innkeeper saw them coming, and accosted Scott with
"Eh, Sir! ye're come early for your draught to-day!"—a disclosure which
was not likely to embarrass his host at all. Wordsworth was probably the
least-discomposed member of the party.—Charles Lamb and his sister once
popped in unannounced on Coleridge at Keswick, and spent three weeks in
the neighborhood. We can all fancy the little man on the top of Skiddaw,
with his mind full as usual of quips and pranks, and struggling with the
emotions of mountain-land, so new and strange to a Cockney, such as he
truly described himself. His loving readers do not forget his statement
of the comparative charms of Skiddaw and Fleet Street; and on the spot
we quote his exclamations about the peak, and the keen air there, and
the look over into Scotland, and down upon a sea of mountains which made
him giddy. We are glad he came and enjoyed a day, which, as he said,
would stand out like a mountain in his life; but we feel that he could
never have followed his friends hither,—Coleridge and Wordsworth,—and
have made himself at home. The warmth of a city and the hum of human
voices all day long were necessary to his spirits. As to his passage at
arms with Southey,—everybody's sympathies are with Lamb; and he
only vexes us by his humility and gratitude at being pardoned by the
aggressor, whom he had in fact humiliated in all eyes but his own. It
was one of Southey's spurts of insolent bigotry; and Lamb's plea for
tolerance and fair play was so sound as to make it a poor affectation in
Southey to assume a pardoning air; but, if Lamb's kindly and sensitive
nature could not sustain him in so virtuous an opposition, it is well
that the two men did not meet on the top of Skiddaw.—Canning's visit to
Storrs, on Windermere, was a great event in its day; and Lockhart tells
us, in his "Life of Scott," what the regatta was like, when Wilson
played Admiral, and the group of local poets, and Scott, were in the
train of the statesman. Since that day, it has been a common thing for
illustrious persons to appear in our valleys. Statesmen, churchmen,
university-men, princes, peers, bishops, authors, artists, flock hither;
and during the latter years of Wordsworth's life, the average number
of strangers who called at Rydal Mount in the course of the season was
eight hundred.
During the growth of the District from its wildness to this thronged
state, a minor light of the region was kindling, flickering, failing,
gleaming, and at last going out,—anxiously watched and tended, but to
little purpose. The life of Hartley Coleridge has been published by his
family; and there can, therefore, be no scruple in speaking of him here.
The remembrance of him haunts us all,—almost as his ghost haunts his
kind landlady. Long after his death, she used to "hear him at night
laughing in his room," as he used to do when he lived there. A peculiar
laugh it was, which broke out when fancies crossed him, whether he was
alone or in company. Travellers used to look after him on the road, and
guides and drivers were always willing to tell about him; and still
his old friends almost expect to see Hartley at any turn,—the little
figure, with the round face, marked by the blackest eyebrows and
eyelashes, and by a smile and expression of great eccentricity. As we
passed, he would make a full stop in the road, face about, take off his
black-and-white straw hat, and bow down to the ground. The first glance
in return was always to see whether he was sober. The Hutchinsons must
remember him. He was one of the audience, when they held their concert
under the sycamores in Mr. Harrison's grounds at Ambleside; and he
thereupon wrote a sonnet,[A] doubtless well known in America. When I
wanted his leave to publish that sonnet, in an account of "Frolics with
the Hutchinsons," it was necessary to hunt him up, from public-house
to public-house, early in the morning. It is because these things are
universally known,—because he was seen staggering in the road, and
spoken of by drivers and lax artisans as an alehouse comrade, that I
speak of him here, in order that I may testify how he was beloved and
cherished by the best people in his neighborhood. I can hardly speak
of him myself as a personal acquaintance; for I could not venture on
inviting him to my house. I saw what it was to others to be subject to
day-long visits from him, when he would ask for wine, and talk from
morning to night,—and a woman, solitary and busy, could not undertake
that sort of hospitality; but I saw how forbearing his friends were, and
why,—and I could sympathize in their regrets when he died. I met him
in company occasionally, and never saw him sober; but I have heard from
several common friends of the charm of his conversation, and the beauty
of his gentle and affectionate nature. He was brought into the District
when four years old; and it does not appear that he ever had a chance
allowed him of growing into a sane man. Wordsworth used to say that
Hartley's life's failure arose mainly from his having grown up "wild
as the breeze,"—delivered over, without help or guardianship, to the
vagaries of an imagination which overwhelmed all the rest of him. There
was a strong constitutional likeness to his father, evident enough to
all; but no pains seem to have been taken on any hand to guard him from
the snare, or to invigorate his will, and aid him in self-discipline.
The great catastrophe, the ruinous blow, which rendered him hopeless, is
told in the Memoir; but there are particulars which help to account for
it. Hartley had spent his school-days under a master as eccentric as he
himself ever became. The Rev. John Dawes of Ambleside was one of the
oddities that may be found in the remote places of modern England. He
had no idea of restraint, for himself or his pupils; and when they
arrived, punctually or not, for morning school, they sometimes found the
door shut, and chalked with "Gone a-hunting," or "Gone a-fishing," or
gone away somewhere or other. Then Hartley would sit down under the
bridge, or in the shadow of the wood, or lie on the grass on the
hill-side, and tell tales to his schoolfellows for hours. His mind was
developed by the conversation of his father and his father's friends;
and he himself had a great friendship with Professor Wilson, who always
stood by him with a pitying love. He had this kind of discursive
education, but no discipline; and when he went to college, he was at the
mercy of any who courted his affection, intoxicated his imagination, and
then led him into vice. His Memoir shows how he lost his fellowship at
Oriel College, Oxford, at the end of his probationary year. He had been
warned by the authorities against his sin of intemperance; and he bent
his whole soul to get through that probationary year. For eleven months,
and many days of the twelfth, he lived soberly and studied well. Then
the old tempters agreed in London to go down to Oxford and get hold of
Hartley. They went down on the top of the coach, got access to his room,
made him drunk, and carried him with them to London; and he was not to
be found when he should have passed. The story of his death is but too
like this.
[Footnote A:
SONNET
TO TENNYSON, AFTER HEARING ABBY HUTCHINSON SING "THE MAY-QUEEN" AT
AMBLESIDE.
I would, my friend, indeed, thou hadst been
here
Last night, beneath the shadowy sycamore,
To hear the lines, to me well known before,
Embalmed in music so translucent clear.
Each word of thine came singly to the ear,
Yet all was blended in a flowing stream.
It had the rich repose of summer dream,
The light distinct of frosty atmosphere.
Still have I loved thy verse, yet never knew
How sweet it was, till woman's voice invested
The pencilled outline with the living hue,
And every note of feeling proved and tested.
What might old Pindar be, if once again
The harp and voice were trembling with his
strain!
]
His fellowship lost, he came, ruinously humbled, to live in this
District, at first under compulsion to take pupils, whom, of course, he
could not manage. On the death of his mother, an annuity was purchased
for him, and paid quarterly, to keep him out of debt, if possible. He
could not take care of money, and he was often hungry, and often begged
the loan of a sixpence; and when the publicans made him welcome to what
he pleased to have, in consideration of the company he brought together,
to hear his wonderful talk, his wit, and his dreams, he was helpless in
the snare. We must remember that he was a fine scholar, as well as a
dreamer and a humorist; and there was no order of intellect, from the
sage to the peasant, which could resist the charm of his discourse. He
had taken his degree with high distinction at Oxford; and yet the old
Westmoreland "statesman," who, offered whiskey and water, accepts the
one and says the other can be had anywhere, would sit long to hear what
Hartley had to tell of what he had seen or dreamed. At gentlemen's
tables, it was a chance how he might talk,—sublimely, sweetly, or with
a want of tact which made sad confusion. In the midst of the great
black-frost at the close of 1848, he was at a small dinner-party at
the house of a widow lady, about four miles from his lodgings. During
dinner, some scandal was talked about some friends of his to whom he
was warmly attached. He became excited on their behalf,—took Champagne
before he had eaten enough, and, before the ladies left the table, was
no longer master of himself. His host, a very young man, permitted some
practical joking: brandy was ordered, and given to the unconscious
Hartley; and by eleven o'clock he was clearly unfit to walk home alone.
His hostess sent her footman with him, to see him home. The man took him
through Ambleside, and then left him to find his way for the other two
miles. The cold was as severe as any ever known in this climate; and it
was six in the morning when his landlady heard some noise in the porch,
and found Hartley stumbling in. She put him to bed, put hot bricks to
his feet, and tried all the proper means; and in the middle of the day
he insisted on getting up and going out. He called at the house of a
friend, Dr. S——, near Ambleside. The kind physician scolded him for
coming out, sent for a carriage, took him home, and put him to bed. He
never rose again, but died on the 6th of January, 1849. The young host
and the old hostess have followed him, after deeply deploring that
unhappy day.
It was sweet, as well as sorrowful, to see how he was mourned.
Everybody, from his old landlady, who cared for him like a mother, to
the infant-school children, missed Hartley Coleridge. I went to his
funeral at Grasmere. The rapid Rotha rippled and dashed over the stones
beside the churchyard; the yews rose dark from the faded grass of the
graves; and in mighty contrast to both, Helvellyn stood, in wintry
silence, and sheeted with spotless snow. Among the mourners Wordsworth
was conspicuous, with his white hair and patriarchal aspect. He had
no cause for painful emotions on his own account; for he had been a
faithful friend to the doomed victim who was now beyond the reach of his
tempters. While there was any hope that stern remonstrance might rouse
the feeble will and strengthen the suffering conscience to relieve
itself, such remonstrance was pressed; and when the case was past hope,
Wordsworth's door was ever open to his old friend's son. Wordsworth
could stand by that open grave without a misgiving about his own share
in the scene which was here closing; and calm and simply grave he
looked. He might mourn over the life; but he could scarcely grieve at
the death. The grave was close behind the family group of the Wordsworth
tombs. It shows, above the name and dates, a sculptured crown of thorns
and Greek cross, with the legend, "By thy Cross and Passion, Good Lord,
deliver me!"
One had come and gone meantime who was as express a contrast to Hartley
Coleridge as could be imagined,—a man of energy, activity, stern
self-discipline, and singular strength of will. Such a cast of character
was an inexplicable puzzle to poor Hartley. He showed this by giving his
impression of another person of the same general mode of life,—that
A.B. was "a monomaniac about everything." It was to rest a hard-worked
mind and body, and to satisfy a genuine need of his nature, that Dr.
Arnold came here from Rugby with his family,—first, to lodgings for an
occasional holiday, and afterwards to a house of his own, at Christmas
and Midsummer, and with the intention of living permanently at Fox How,
when he should give up his work at Rugby.
He was first at a house at the foot of Rydal Mount, at Christmas, 1831,
"with the road on one side of the garden, and the Rotha on the other,
which goes brawling away under our windows with its perpetual music. The
higher mountains that bound our view are all snow-capped; but it is all
snug, and warm, and green in the valley. Nowhere on earth have I ever
seen a spot of more perfect and enjoyable beauty, with not a single
object out of tune with it, look which way I will." He built Fox How,
two or three years later, and at once began his course of hospitality by
having lads of the sixth form as his guests,—not for purposes of study,
but of recreation, and, yet more, to give them that element of education
which consists in familiarity with the noblest natural scenery. The hue
and cry which arose when he showed himself a reformer, in Church matters
as in politics, followed him here, as we see by his letters; and it was
not till his "Life and Correspondence" appeared that his neighbors here
understood him. It has always been difficult, perhaps, for them to
understand anything modern, or at all vivacious. Everybody respected Dr.
Arnold for his energy and industry, his services to education, and his
devotedness to human welfare; but they were afraid of his supposed
opinions. Not the less heartily did he honor everything that was
admirable in them; and when he was gone, they remembered his ways, and
cherished every trace of him, in a manner which showed how they would
have made much of him, if their own timid prejudices had not stood in
the way. They point out to this day the spot where they saw him stand,
without his hat, on Rotha bridge, watching the gush of the river
under the wooded bank, or gazing into the basin of vapors within the
cul-de-sac of Fairfield,—the same view which he looked on from his
study, as he sat on his sofa, surrounded by books. The neighbors show
the little pier at Waterhead whence he watched the morning or the
evening light on the lake, the place where he bathed, and the tracks in
the mountains which led to his favorite ridges. Everybody has read his
"Life and Correspondence," and therefore knows what his mode of life was
here, and how great was his enjoyment of it. We have all read of the
mountain-trips in summer, and the skating on Rydal Lake in winter,—and
how his train of children enjoyed everything with him, as far as they
could. It was but for a few years; and the time never came for him to
retire hither from Rugby. In June, 1842, he had completed his fourteenth
year at Rugby, and was particularly in need, under some harassing cares,
of the solace and repose which a few hours more would have brought him,
when he was cut off by an illness of two hours. On the day when he was
to have been returning to Fox How, some of his children were travelling
thence to his funeral. His biographer tells us how strong was the
consternation at Rugby, when the tidings spread on that Sunday morning,
"Dr. Arnold is dead." Not slight was the emotion throughout this valley,
when the news passed from house to house, the next day. As I write, I
see the windows which were closed that day, and the trees round the
house,—so grown up since he walked among them!—and the course of the
Rotha, which winds and ripples at the foot of his garden. I never saw
him, for I did not come here till two years after; but I have seen his
widow pass on into her honored old age, and his children part off into
their various homes, and their several callings in life,—to meet in
the beloved house at Fox How, at Christmas, and at many another time.
This leaves only Southey and the Wordsworths; and their ending was not
far off. The old poet had seen almost too much of these endings. One
day, when I found a stoppage in the road at the foot of Rydal Mount,
from a sale of furniture, such as is common in this neighborhood every
spring and autumn, I met Mr. Wordsworth,—not looking observant and
amused, but in his blackest mood of melancholy, and evidently wanting to
get out of the way. He said he did not like the sight: he had seen so
many of these sales; he had seen Southey's, not long before; and these
things reminded him how soon there must be a sale at Rydal Mount. It was
remarked by a third person that this was rather a wilful way of being
miserable; but I never saw a stronger love of life than there was in
them all, even so late in their day as this. Mrs. Wordsworth, then past
her three-score years and ten, observed to me that the worst of living
here was that it made one so unwilling to go. It seems but lately that
she said so; yet she nursed to their graves her daughter and her husband
and his sister, and she herself became blind; so that it was not hard
"to go," when the time came.
Southey's decline was painful to witness,—even as his beloved wife's
had been to himself. He never got over her loss; and his mind was
decidedly shaken before he made the second marriage which has been so
much talked over. One most touching scene there was when he had become
unconscious of all that was said and done around him. Mrs. Southey had
been careless of her own interests about money when she married him, and
had sought no protection for her own property. When there was manifestly
no hope of her husband's mind ever recovering, his brother assembled the
family and other witnesses, and showed them a kind of will which he had
drawn up, by which Mrs. Southey's property was returned to herself,
intact. He said they were all aware that their relative could not, in
his condition, make a will, and that he was even unaware of what they
were doing; but that it was right that they should, pledge themselves by
some overt act to fulfil what would certainly have been his wish. The
bowed head could not be raised, but the nerveless hand was guided to
sign the instrument; and all present agreed to respect it as if it
were a veritable will,—as of course they did. The decline was full of
painful circumstances; and it must have been with a heart full of sorrow
that Wordsworth walked over the hills to attend the funeral.
The next funeral was that of his own daughter Dora,—Mrs. Quillinan. A
story has got about, as untrue as it is disagreeable, that Dora lost
her health from her father's opposition to her marriage, and that
Wordsworth's excessive grief after her death was owing to remorse. I can
myself testify to her health having been very good for a considerable
interval between that difficulty and her last illness; and this is
enough, of itself, to dispose of the story. Her parents considered
the marriage an imprudent one; but after securing sufficient time for
consideration, they said that she must judge for herself; and there were
fine qualities in Mr. Quillinan which could not but win their affection
and substantial regard. His first wife, a friend of Dora Wordsworth's,
was carried out of the house in which she had just been confined, from
fire in the middle of the night; she died from the shock; and she died
recommending her husband and her friend to marry. Such is the understood
history of the case. After much delay they did marry, and lived near
Rydal Mount, where Dora was, as always, the light of the house, as long
as she could go to it. But, after a long and painful decline, she died
in 1847. Her husband followed soon after Wordsworth's death. He lies in
the family corner of Grasmere churchyard, between his two wives. This
appeared to be the place reserved for Mrs. Wordsworth, so that Dora
would lie between her parents. There seemed now to be no room left for
the solitary survivor, and many wondered what would be done; but all had
been thought of. Wordsworth's grave had been made deep enough for two;
and there his widow now rests.
There was much vivid life in them, however clearly the end was
approaching, when I first knew them in 1845. The day after my arrival at
a friend's house, they called on me, excited by two kinds of interest.
Wordsworth had been extremely gratified by hearing, through a book of
mine, how his works were estimated by certain classes of readers in the
United States; and he and Mrs. Wordsworth were eager to learn facts and
opinions about mesmerism, by which I had just recovered from a
long illness, and which they hoped might avail in the case of a
daughter-in-law, then in a dying state abroad. After that day, I met
them frequently, and was at their house, when I could go. On occasion of
my first visit, I was struck by an incident which explained the ridicule
we have all heard thrown on the old poet for a self-esteem which he was
merely too simple to hide. Nothing could be easier than to make a quiz
of what he said to me; but to me it seemed delightful. As he at once
talked of his poems, I thought I might; and I observed that he might
be interested in knowing which of his poems had been Dr. Channing's
favorite. Seeing him really interested, I told him that I had not been
many hours under Dr. Channing's roof before he brought me "The Happy
Warrior," which, he said, moved him more than any other in the
whole series. Wordsworth remarked,—and repeated the remark very
earnestly,—that this was evidently applicable to the piece, "not as
a poem, not as fulfilling the conditions of poetry, but as a chain of
extremely valuable thoughts." Then he repeated emphatically,—"a chain
of extremely valuable thoughts!" This was so true that it seemed as
natural for him to say it as Dr. Channing, or any one else.
It is indisputable that his mind and manners were hurt by the prominence
which his life at the Lakes—a life very public, under the name of
seclusion—gave, in his own eyes; to his own works and conversation; but
he was less absorbed in his own objects, less solemn, less severed from
ordinary men than is supposed, and has been given out by strangers, who,
to the number of eight hundred in a year, have been received by him with
a bow, asked to see the garden-terraces where he had meditated this and
that work, and dismissed with another bow, and good wishes for their
health and pleasure,—the host having, for the most part, not heard, or
not attended to, the name of his visitor. I have seen him receive in
that way a friend, a Commissioner of Education, whom I ventured to take
with me, (a thing I very rarely did,) and in the evening have had a
message asking if I knew how Mr. Wordsworth could obtain an interview
with this very gentleman, who was said to be in the neighborhood. All
this must be very bad for anybody; and so was the distinction of having
early chosen this District for a home. When I first came, I told my
friends here that I was alarmed for myself, when I saw the spirit of
insolence which seemed to possess the cultivated residents, who really
did virtually assume that the mountains and vales were somehow their
property, or at least a privilege appropriate to superior people
like themselves. Wordsworth's sonnets about the railway were a mild
expression of his feelings in this direction; and Mrs. Wordsworth,
in spite of her excellent sense, took up his song, and declared with
unusual warmth that green fields, with daisies and buttercups, were as
good for Lancashire operatives as our lakes and valleys. I proposed that
the people should judge of this for themselves; but there was no end to
ridicule of "the people from Birthwaite" (the end of the railway, five
miles off). Some had been seen getting their dinner in the churchyard,
and others inquiring how best to get up Loughrigg,—"evidently, quite
puzzled, and not knowing where to go." My reply, "that they would know
next time," was not at all sympathized in. The effect of this exclusive
temper was pernicious in the neighborhood. A petition to Parliament
against the railway was not brought to me, as it was well known that
I would not sign it; but some little girls undertook my case; and the
effect of their parroting of Mr. Wordsworth, about "ourselves" and "the
common people" who intrude upon us, was as sad as it was absurd. The
whole matter ended rather remarkably. When all were gone but Mrs.
Wordsworth, and she was blind, a friend who was as a daughter to her
remarked, one summer day, that there were some boys on the Mount in
the garden. "Ah!" said Mrs. Wordsworth, "there is no end to those
people;—boys from Birthwaite!—boys from Birthwaite!" It was the Prince
of Wales, with a companion or two.
The notion of Wordsworth's solemnity and sublimity, as something
unremitting, was a total mistake. It probably arose from the want of
proportion in his mind, as in his sister's, before referred to. But he
relished the common business of life, and not only could take in, but
originate a joke. I remember his quizzing a common friend of ours,—one
much esteemed by us all,—who had a wonderful ability of falling asleep
in an instant, when not talking. Mr. Wordsworth told me of the extreme
eagerness of this gentleman, Mrs. Wordsworth, and himself, to see the
view over Switzerland from the ridge of the Jura. Mrs. Wordsworth could
not walk so fast as the gentlemen, and her husband let the friend go on
by himself. When they arrived, a minute or two after him, they found him
sitting on a stone in face of all Switzerland, fast asleep. When Mr.
Wordsworth mimicked the sleep, with his head on one side, anybody
could have told whom he was quizzing.—He and Mrs. Wordsworth, but too
naturally impressed with the mischief of overwalking in the case of
women, took up a wholly mistaken notion that I walked too much. One day
I was returning from a circuit of ten miles with a guest, when we
met the Wordsworths. They asked where we had been. "By Red Bank to
Grasmere." Whereupon Mr. Wordsworth laid his hand on my guest's arm,
saying, "There, there! take care what you are about! don't let her lead
you about! I can tell you, she has killed off half the gentlemen in the
county!"—Mrs. Hemans tells us, that, before she had known him many
hours, she was saying to him, "Dear me, Mr. Wordsworth! how can you be
so giddy?"
His interest in common things never failed. It has been observed that
he and Mrs. Wordsworth did incalculable good by the example they
unconsciously set the neighborhood of respectable thrift. There are no
really poor people at Rydal, because the great lady at the Hall, Lady Le
Fleming, takes care that there shall be none,—at the expense of great
moral mischief. But there is a prevalent recklessness, grossness, and
mingled extravagance and discomfort in the family management, which, I
am told, was far worse when the Wordsworths came than it is now. Going
freely among the neighbors, and welcoming and helping them familiarly,
the Wordsworths laid their own lives open to observation; and the
mingled carefulness and comfort—the good thrift, in short—wrought as
a powerful lesson all around. As for what I myself saw,—they took a
practical interest in my small purchase of land for my abode; and Mr.
Wordsworth often came to consult upon the plan and progress of the
house. He used to lie on the grass, beside the young oaks, before the
foundations were dug; and he referred me to Mrs. Wordsworth as the best
possible authority about the placing of windows and beds. He climbed to
the upper rooms before there was a staircase; and we had to set Mrs.
Wordsworth as a watch over him, when there was a staircase, but no
balustrade. When the garden was laid out, he planted a stone-pine
(which is flourishing) under the terrace-wall, washed his hands in the
watering-pot, and gave the place and me at once his blessing and some
thrifty counsel. When I began farming, he told me an immense deal about
his cow; and both of them came to see my first calf, and ascertain
whether she had the proper marks of the handsome short-horn of the
region. The distinctive impression which the family made on the minds
of the people about them was that of practical ability; and it was
thoroughly well conveyed by the remark of a man at Rydal, on hearing
some talk of Mrs. Wordsworth, a few days after the poet's death:
—"She's a gay [rare] clever body, who will carry on the business as
well as any of 'em."
Nothing could be more affecting than to watch the silent changes in Mrs.
Wordsworth's spirits during the ten years which followed the death of
her daughter. For many months her husband's gloom was terrible, in the
evenings, or in dull weather. Neither of them could see to read much;
and the poet was not one who ever pretended to restrain his emotions,
or assume a cheerfulness which he did not feel. We all knew that the
mother's heart was the bereaved one, however impressed the father's
imagination might be by the picture of his own desolation; and we saw
her mute about her own trial, and growing whiter in the face and smaller
from month to month, while he put no restraint upon his tears and
lamentations. The winter evenings were dreary; and in hot summer days
the aged wife had to follow him, when he was missed for any time, lest
he should be sitting in the sun without his hat. Often she found him
asleep on the heated rock. His final illness was wearing and dreary to
her; but there her part was clear, and she was adequate to it. "You
are going to Dora," she whispered to him, when the issue was no longer
doubtful. She thought he did not hear or heed; but some hours after,
when some one opened the curtain, he said, "Are you Dora?" Composed and
cheerful in the prospect of his approaching rest, and absolutely without
solicitude for herself, the wife was everything to him till the last
moment; and when he was gone, the anxieties of the self-forgetting woman
were over. She attended his funeral, and afterwards chose to fill her
accustomed place among the guests who filled the house. She made tea
that evening as usual; and the lightening of her spirits from that time
forward was evident. It was a lovely April day, the 23d, (Shakspeare's
birth—and death-day,) when her task of nursing closed. The news spread
fast that the old poet was gone; and we all naturally turned our eyes up
to the roof under which he lay. There, above and amidst the young green
of the woods, the modest dwelling shone in the sunlight. The smoke went
up thin and straight into the air; but the closed windows gave the place
a look of death. There he was lying whom we should see no more.
The poor sister remained for five years longer. Travellers, American
and others, must remember having found the garden-gate locked at Rydal
Mount, and perceiving the reason why, in seeing a little garden-chair,
with an emaciated old lady in it, drawn by a nurse round and round the
gravelled space before the house. That was Miss Wordsworth, taking her
daily exercise. It was a great trouble, at times, that she could not be
placed in some safe privacy; and Wordsworth's feudal loyalty was put to
a severe test in the matter. It had been settled that a cottage should
be built for his sister, in a field of his, beyond the garden. The plan
was made, and the turf marked out, and the digging about to begin,
when the great lady at the Hall, Lady Le Fleming, interfered with a
prohibition. She assumed the feudal prerogative of determining what
should or should not be built on all the lands over which the Le
Flemings have borne sway; and her extraordinary determination was, that
no dwelling should be built, except on the site of a former one! We
could scarcely believe we had not been carried back into the Middle
Ages, when we heard it; but the old poet, whom any sovereign in Europe
would have been delighted to gratify, submitted with a good grace, and
thenceforth robbed his sister's feet, and coaxed and humored her at
home,—trusting his guests to put up with the inconveniences of her
state, as he could not remove them from sight and hearing. After she was
gone also, Mrs. Wordsworth, entirely blind, and above eighty years of
age, seemed to have no cares, except when the errors and troubles of
others touched her judgment or sympathy. She was well cared for by
nieces and friends. Her plain common sense and cheerfulness appeared
in one of the last things she said, a few hours before her death. She
remarked on the character of the old hymns, practical and familiar,
which people liked when she was young, and which answered some purposes
better than the sublimer modern sort. She repeated part of a child's
hymn,—very homely, about going straight to school, and taking care of
the books, and learning the lesson well,—and broke off, saying, "There!
if you want to hear the rest, ask the Bishop o' London. He knows it."
Then, all were gone; and there remained only the melancholy breaking up
of the old home which had been interesting to the world for forty-six
years. Mrs. Wordsworth died in January, 1859. In the May following, the
sale took place which Wordsworth had gloomily foreseen so many years
before. Everything of value was reserved, and the few articles desired
by strangers were bought by commission; and thus the throng at the sale
was composed of the ordinary elements. The spectacle was sufficiently
painful to make it natural for old friends to stay away. Doors and
windows stood wide. The sofa and tea-table where the wisest and best
from all parts of the world had held converse were turned out to be
examined and bid for. Anybody who chose passed the sacred threshold; the
auctioneer's hammer was heard on the terrace; and the hospitable parlor
and kitchen were crowded with people swallowing tea in the intervals of
their business. One farmer rode six-and-thirty miles that morning to
carry home something that had belonged to Wordsworth; and, in default of
anything better, he took a patched old table-cover. There was a bed
of anemones under the windows, at one end of the house; and a bed of
anemones is a treasure in our climate. It was in full bloom in the
morning; and before sunset, every blossom was gone, and the bed was
trampled into ruin. It was dreary work! The two sons live at a distance;
and the house is let to tenants of another name.
I perceive that I have not noticed the poet's laureateship. The truth
is, the office never seemed to belong to him; and we forgot it, when
not specially reminded of it. We did not like to think of him in
court-dress, going through the ceremonies of levee or ball, in his
old age. His white hair and dim eyes were better at home among the
mountains.
There stand the mountains, from age to age; and there run the rivers,
with their full and never-pausing tide, while those who came to live and
grow wise beside them are all gone! One after another, they have lain
down to their everlasting rest in the valleys where their step and their
voices were as familiar as the points of the scenery. The region has
changed much since they came as to a retreat. It was they who caused the
change, for the most part; and it was not for them to complain of it;
but the consequence is, that with them has passed away a peculiar
phase of life in England. It is one which can neither be continued
nor repeated. The Lake District is no longer a retreat; and any other
retreat must have different characteristics, and be illumined by some
different order of lights. The case being so, I have felt no scruple in
asking the attention of my readers to a long story, and to full details
of some of the latest Lights of the Lake District.