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Autobiographic Sketches

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Title: Autobiographic Sketches

Author: Thomas De Quincey


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7306]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by Anne Soulard, Arno Peters, Tiffany Vergon
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES.

BY

THOMAS DE QUINCEY




SELECTIONS, GRAVE AND GAY,
FROM WRITINGS PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED,

BY
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.




EXTRACT FROM A LETTER
WRITTEN BY MR. DE QUINCEY TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF THIS WORKS.


Lasswade, _January 8_, 1853


MY DEAR SIR:

I am on the point of revising and considerably altering, for
republication in England, an edition of such amongst my writings as
it may seem proper deliberately to avow. Not that I have any intention,
or consciously any reason, expressly to disown any one thing that I
have ever published; but some things have sufficiently accomplished
their purpose when they have met the call of that particular transient
occasion in which they arose; and others, it may be thought on review,
might as well have been suppressed from the very first. Things immoral
would of course fall within that category; of these, however, I cannot
reproach myself with ever having published so much as one. But even
pure levities, simply _as_ such, and without liability to any worse
objection, may happen to have no justifying principle of life within
them; and if, any where, I find such a reproach to lie against a paper
of mine, that paper I should wish to cancel. So that, upon the whole,
my new and revised edition is likely to differ by very considerable
changes from the original papers; and, consequently, to that extent
is likely to differ from your existing Boston reprint.

These changes, as sure to be more or less advantageous to the collection,
it is my wish to place at your disposal as soon as possible, in order
that you may make what use of them you see fit, be it little or much. It
may so happen that the public demand will give you no opportunity for
using them at all. I go on therefore to mention, that over and above
these changes, which may possibly strike you as sometimes mere caprices,
pulling down in order to rebuild, or turning squares into rotundas,
(_diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis_,) it is my purpose to
enlarge this edition by as many new papers as I find available for such a
station. These I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so
far as regards the U.S., of _your_ house exclusively; not with any view
to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which you
have already rendered me; viz., first, in having brought together so
widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by too
painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be
absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator in
the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or
the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I
could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merely
upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, will
not be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken an
interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they are
now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs.
TICKNOR, REED, & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of any power to
make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom in
America.

I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest
trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my
sense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your
honorable house.

Ever believe me my dear sir,
Your faithful and obliged,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.




PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION


The miscellaneous writings which I propose to lay before the public in
this body of selections are in part to be regarded as a republication of
papers scattered through several British journals twenty or thirty years
ago, which papers have been reprinted in a collective form by an American
house of high character in Boston; but in part they are to be viewed as
entirely new, large sections having been intercalated in the present
edition, and other changes made, which, even to the old parts, by giving
very great expansion, give sometimes a character of absolute novelty.
Once, therefore, at home, with the allowance for the changes here
indicated, and once in America, it may be said that these writings have
been in some sense published. But _publication_ is a great idea never
even approximated by the utmost anxieties of man. Not the Bible, not the
little book which, in past times, came next to the Bible in European
diffusion and currency, [1] viz., the treatise "De Imitatione Christi,"
has yet in any generation been really published. Where is the _printed_
book of which, in Coleridge's words, it may not be said that, after all
efforts to publish itself, still it remains, for the world of possible
readers, "as good as manuscript"? Not to insist, however, upon any
romantic rigor in constructing this idea, and abiding by the ordinary
standard of what is understood by _publication_, it is probable that, in
many cases, my own papers must have failed in reaching even this. For
they were printed as contributions to journals.  Now, that mode of
publication is unavoidably disadvantageous to a writer, except under
unusual conditions. By its harsh peremptory punctuality, it drives a man
into hurried writing, possibly into saying the thing that is not. They
won't wait an hour for you in a magazine or a review; they won't wait for
truth; you may as well reason with the sea, or a railway train, as in
such a case with an editor; and, as it makes no difference whether that
sea which you desire to argue with is the Mediterranean or the Baltic,
so, with that editor and his deafness, it matters not a straw whether he
belong to a northern or a southern journal. Here is one evil of journal
writing--viz., its overmastering precipitation. A second is, its effect
at times in narrowing your publicity. Every journal, or pretty nearly so,
is understood to hold (perhaps in its very title it makes proclamation of
holding) certain fixed principles in politics, or possibly religion.
These distinguishing features, which become badges of enmity and
intolerance, all the more intense as they descend upon narrower and
narrower grounds of separation, must, at the very threshold, by warning
off those who dissent from them, so far operate to limit your audience.
To take my own case as an illustration: these present sketches were
published in a journal dedicated to purposes of political change such as
many people thought revolutionary. I thought so myself, and did not go
along with its politics. Inevitably that accident shut them out from the
knowledge of a very large reading class. Undoubtedly this journal, being
ably and conscientiously conducted, had some circulation amongst a
neutral class of readers; and amongst its own class it was popular. But
its own class did not ordinarily occupy that position in regard to social
influence which could enable them rapidly to diffuse the knowledge of a
writer. A reader whose social standing is moderate may communicate his
views upon a book or a writer to his own circle; but his own circle is a
narrow one. Whereas, in aristocratic classes, having more leisure and
wealth, the intercourse is inconceivably more rapid; so that the
publication of any book which interests _them_ is secured at once; and
this publishing influence passes downwards; but rare, indeed, is the
inverse process of publication through an influence spreading upwards.

According to the way here described, the papers now presented to the
public, like many another set of papers nominally published, were _not_
so in any substantial sense. Here, at home, they may be regarded as
still unpublished. [2] But, in such a case, why were not the papers at
once detached from the journal, and reprinted? In the neglect to do this,
some there are who will read a blamable carelessness in the author; but,
in that carelessness, others will read a secret consciousness that the
papers were of doubtful value. I have heard, indeed, that some persons,
hearing of this republication, had interpreted the case thus: Within the
last four or five years, a practice has arisen amongst authors of
gathering together into volumes their own scattered contributions to
periodical literature. Upon that suggestion, they suppose me suddenly to
have remembered that I also had made such contributions; that mine might
be entitled to their chance as well as those of others; and, accordingly,
that on such a slight invitation _ab extra_, I had called back into life
what otherwise I had long since regarded as having already fulfilled its
mission, and must doubtless have dismissed to oblivion.

I do not certainly know, or entirely believe, that any such thing was
really said. But, however that may be, no representation can be more
opposed to the facts. Never for an instant did I falter in my purpose
of republishing most of the papers which I had written. Neither, if
I myself had been inclined to forget them, should I have been allowed
to do so by strangers. For it happens that, during the fourteen last
years, I have received from many quarters in England, in Ireland, in
the British colonies, and in the United States, a series of letters
expressing a far profounder interest in papers written by myself than
any which I could ever think myself  entitled to look for. Had I,
therefore, otherwise cherished no purposes of republication, it now
became a duty of gratitude and respect to these numerous correspondents,
that I should either republish the papers in question, or explain why
I did not. The obstacle in fact had been in part the shifting state
of the law which regulated literary property, and especially the
property in periodical literature. But a far greater difficulty lay
in the labor (absolutely insurmountable to myself) of bringing together
from so many quarters the scattered materials of the collection. This
labor, most fortunately, was suddenly taken off my hands by the eminent
house of Messrs TICKNOR, REED, & FIELDS, Boston, U. S. To them I owe
my acknowledgments, first of all, for that service: they have brought
together a great majority of my fugitive papers in a series of volumes
now amounting to twelve. And, secondly, I am bound to mention that
they have made me a sharer in the profits of the publication, called
upon to do so by no law whatever, and assuredly by no expectation of
that sort upon my part.

Taking as the basis of my remarks this collective American edition,
I will here attempt a rude general classification of all the articles
which compose it. I distribute them grossly into three classes: _First_,
into that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader; but
which, in doing so, may or may not happen occasionally to reach a
higher station, at which the amusement passes into an impassioned
interest. Some papers are merely playful; but others have a mixed
character. These present _Autobiographic  Sketches_ illustrate what
I mean. Generally, they pretend to little beyond that sort of amusement
which attaches to any real story, thoughtfully and faithfully related,
moving through a succession of scenes sufficiently varied, that are
not suffered to remain too long upon the eye, and that connect
themselves at every stage with intellectual objects. But, even here,
I do not scruple to claim from the reader, occasionally, a higher
consideration. At times, the narrative rises into a far higher key.
Most of all it does so at a period of the writer's life where, of
necessity, a severe abstraction takes place from all that could invest
him with any alien interest; no display that might dazzle the reader,
nor ambition that could carry his eye forward with curiosity to the
future, nor successes, fixing his eye on the present; nothing on the
stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief--a
mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a voice. But something of the
same interest will be found, perhaps, to rekindle at a maturer age,
when the characteristic features of the individual mind have been
unfolded. And I contend that much more than amusement ought to settle
upon any narrative of a life that is really _confidential_. It is
singular--but many of my readers will know it for a truth--that vast
numbers of people, though liberated from all reasonable motives to
self-restraint, _cannot_ be confidential--have  it not in their power
to lay aside reserve; and many, again, cannot be so with particular
people. I have witnessed more than once the case, that a  young female
dancer, at a certain turn of a peculiar dance, could not--though she
had died for it--sustain a free, fluent motion. Aerial chains fell
upon her at one point; some invisible spell (who could say _what_?)
froze her elasticity. Even as a horse, at noonday on an open heath,
starts aside from something his rider cannot see; or as the flame
within a Davy lamp feeds upon the poisonous gas up to the meshes that
surround it, but there suddenly is arrested by barriers that no Aladdin
will ever dislodge. It is because a man cannot see and measure these
mystical forces which palsy him, that he cannot deal with them
effectually. If he were able really to pierce the haze which so often
envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and reserve,
there cannot be a life moving at all under intellectual impulses that
would not, through that single force of absolute frankness, fall within
the reach of a deep, solemn, and sometimes even of a thrilling interest.
Without pretending to an interest of this quality, I have done what
was possible on _my_ part towards the readiest access to such an
interest by perfect sincerity--saying every where nothing _but_ the
truth; and in any case forbearing to say the _whole_ truth only through
consideration for others.

Into the second class I throw those papers which address themselves
purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty; or do so primarily.
Let me call them by the general name of ESSAYS. These, as in other
cases of the same kind, must have their value  measured by two separate
questions. A. What is the problem, and of what rank in dignity or in
use, which the essay undertakes? And next, that point being settled,
B. What is the success obtained? and (as a separate question) what is
the executive ability displayed in the solution of the problem? This
latter question is naturally no question for myself, as the answer
would involve a verdict upon my own merit. But, generally, there will
be quite enough in the answer to question A for establishing the value
of any essay on its soundest basis. _Prudens interrogatio est dimidium
scientiae._ Skilfully to frame your question, is half way towards
insuring the true answer. Two or three of the problems treated in these
essays I will here rehearse.

1. ESSENISM--The essay on this, where mentioned at all in print, has
been mentioned as dealing with a question of pure speculative curiosity:
so little suspicion is abroad of that real question which lies below.
Essenism means simply this--Christianity before Christ, and consequently
without Christ. If, therefore, Essenism could make good its pretensions,
there at one blow would be an end of Christianity, which in that case
is not only superseded as an idle repetition of a religious system
already published, but also as a criminal plagiarism. Nor can the wit
of man evade that conclusion. But even _that_ is not the worst. When
we contemplate the total orb of Christianity, we see it divide into
two hemispheres: first, an ethical system, differing _centrally_ from
any previously made known to man;  secondly, a mysterious and divine
machinery for reconciling man to God; a teaching to be taught, but
also a work to be worked. Now, the first we find again in the ethics
of the counterfeit Essenes--which  ought not to surprise us at all;
since it is surely an easy thing for him who pillages my thoughts _ad
libitum_ to reproduce a perfect resemblance in his own: [3] but what
has become of the second, viz., not the teaching, but the operative
working of Christianity? The ethical system is replaced by a stolen
system; but what replaces the mysterious _agencies_ of the Christian
faith? In Essenism we find again a saintly scheme of ethics; but where
is the scheme of mediation?

In the Roman church, there have been some theologians who have also
seen reason to suspect the romance of "Essenismus." And I am not sure
that the knowledge of this fact may not have operated to blunt the
suspicions of the Protestant churches. I do not mean that such a fact
would have absolutely deafened Protestant ears to the grounds of
suspicion when loudly proclaimed; but it is very likely to have
indisposed them towards listening. Meantime, so far as I am acquainted
with these Roman Catholic demurs, the difference between _them_ and
my own is broad. They, without  suspecting any subtle, fraudulent
purpose, simply recoil from the romantic air of such a statement--which
builds up, as with an enchanter's wand, an important sect, such as
could not possibly have escaped the notice of Christ and his apostles.
I, on the other hand, insist not only upon the revolting incompatibility
of such a sect with the absence of all attention to it in the New
Testament, but (which is far more important) the incompatibility of
such a sect (as a sect elder than Christ) with the originality and
heavenly revelation of Christianity. Here is my first point of
difference from the Romish objectors. The second is this: not content
with exposing the imposture, I go on, and attempt to show in what real
circumstances, fraudulently disguised, it might naturally have arisen.
In the real circumstances of the Christian church, when struggling
with _Jewish_ persecution at some period of the generation between the
crucifixion and the siege of Jerusalem, arose probably that secret
defensive society of Christians which suggested to Josephus his knavish
forgery. We must remember that Josephus did not write until _after_
the great ruins effected by the siege; that he wrote at Rome, far
removed from the criticism of those survivors who could have exposed,
or had a motive for exposing, his malicious frauds; and, finally, that
he wrote under the patronage of the Flavian family: by his sycophancy
he had won their protection, which would have overawed any Christian
whatever from coming forward to unmask him, in the very improbable
case of a work so large, costly, and, by its title, merely
archaeological,  finding its way, at such a period, into the hands of
any poor hunted Christian. [4]

2. THE CAESARS.--This, though written hastily, and in a situation where
I had no aid from books, is yet far from being what some people have
supposed it--a simple recapitulation, or _resumé_, of the Roman
imperatorial history. It moves rapidly over the ground, but still with
an exploring eye, carried right and left into the deep shades that have
gathered so thickly over the one solitary road [5] traversing that part
of history. Glimpses of moral truth, or suggestions of what may lead to
it; indications of neglected difficulties, and occasionally conjectural
solutions of such difficulties,--these are what this essay offers. It was
meant as a specimen of fruits, gathered hastily and without effort, by a
vagrant but thoughtful mind: through the coercion of its theme, sometimes
it became ambitious; but I did not give to it an ambitious title. Still I
felt that the meanest of these suggestions merited a valuation: derelicts
they were, not in the sense of things willfully abandoned by my
predecessors on that road, but in the sense of things blindly overlooked.
And, summing up in one word the pretensions of this particular essay, I
will venture to claim for it so much, at least, of originality as ought
_not_ to have been left open to any body in the nineteenth century.

3. CICERO.--This is not, as might be imagined, any literary valuation
of Cicero; it is a new reading of Roman history in the most dreadful
and comprehensive of her convulsions, in that final stage of her
transmutations to which Cicero was himself a party--and, as I maintain,
a most selfish and unpatriotic party. He was governed in one half by
his own private interest as a _novus homo_ dependent upon a wicked
oligarchy, and in the other half by his blind hatred of Caesar; the
grandeur of whose nature he could not comprehend, and the real
patriotism of whose policy could never be appreciated by one bribed
to a selfish course. The great mob of historians have but one way of
constructing the great events of this era--they succeed to it as to
an inheritance, and chiefly under the misleading of that _prestige_
which is attached to the name of Cicero; on which account it was that
I gave this title to my essay. Seven years after it was published,
this essay, slight and imperfectly developed as is the exposition of
its parts, began to receive some public countenance.

I was going on to abstract the principle involved in some other essays.
But I forbear. These specimens  are sufficient for the purpose of
informing the reader that I do not write without a thoughtful
consideration of my subject; and also, that to think reasonably upon
any question has never been allowed by me as a sufficient ground for
writing upon it, unless I believed myself able to offer some considerable
novelty. Generally I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit
of rectification applied to absolute errors or to injurious limitations
of the truth.

Finally, as a third class, and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher
class of compositions included in the American collection, I rank _The
Confessions of an Opium Eater_, and also (but more emphatically) the
_Suspiria de Profundis_. On these, as modes of impassioned prose ranging
under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature, it is much
more difficult to speak justly, whether in a hostile or a friendly
character. As yet, neither of these two works has ever received the
least degree of that correction and pruning which both require so
extensively; and of the _Suspiria_, not more than perhaps one third
has yet been printed. When both have been fully revised, I shall feel
myself entitled to ask for a more determinate adjudication on their
claims as works of art. At present, I feel authorized to make haughtier
pretensions in right of their _conception_ than I shall venture to do,
under the peril of being supposed to characterize their _execution_.
Two remarks only I shall address to the equity of my reader. First, I
desire to remind him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts
to clothe in  words the visionary scenes derived from the world of
dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins
the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter
sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned
prose; which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a
singular duty of indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even
imperfectly succeeds. The sole Confessions, belonging to past times,
that have at all succeeded in engaging the attention of men, are those
of St. Augustine and of Rousseau. The very idea of breathing a record
of human passion, not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the
saintly confessional, argues an impassioned theme. Impassioned,
therefore, should be the tenor of the composition. Now, in St.
Augustine's Confessions is found one most impassioned passage, viz.,
the lamentation for the death of his youthful friend in the fourth
book; one, and no more. Further there is nothing. In Rousseau there
is not even so much. In the whole work there is nothing grandly
affecting but the character and the inexplicable misery of the writer.

Meantime, by what accident, so foreign to my nature, do I find myself
laying foundations towards a higher valuation of my own workmanship?
O reader, I have been talking idly. I care not for any valuation that
depends upon comparison with others. Place me where you will on the
scale of comparison: only suffer me, though standing lowest in your
catalogue, to rejoice in the recollection of letters expressing the
most fervid interest in particular  passages or scenes of the
_Confessions_, and, by rebound from _them_, an interest in their author:
suffer me also to anticipate that, on the publication of some parts
yet in arrear of the _Suspiria_, you yourself may possibly write a
letter to me, protesting that your disapprobation is just where it
was, but nevertheless that you are disposed to shake hands with me--by
way of proof that you like me better than I deserve.


FOOTNOTES

[1] "_Next to the bible in currency_."--That is, next in the fifteenth
century to the Bible of the nineteenth century. The diffusion of the "De
Imitatione Christi" over Christendom (the idea of Christendom, it must be
remembered, not then including any part of America) anticipated, in 1453,
the diffusion of the Bible in 1853. But why? Through what causes?
Elsewhere I have attempted to show that this enormous (and seemingly
incredible) popularity of the "De Imitatione Christi" is virtually to be
interpreted as a vicarious popularity of the Bible. At that time the
Bible itself was a fountain of inspired truth every where sealed up; but
a whisper ran through the western nations of Europe that the work of
Thomas à Kempis contained some slender rivulets of truth silently
stealing away into light from that interdicted fountain. This belief (so
at least I read the case) led to the prodigious multiplication of the
book, of which not merely the reimpressions, but the separate
translations, are past all counting; though bibliographers _have_
undertaken to count them. The book came forward as an answer to the
sighing of Christian Europe for light from heaven. I speak of Thomas à
Kempis as the author; but his claim was disputed. Gerson was adopted by
France as the author; and other local saints by other nations.

[2] At the same time it must not be denied, that, if you lose by a
journal in the way here described, you also gain by it. The journal gives
you the benefit of its own separate audience, that might else never have
heard your name. On the other hand, in such a case, the journal secures
to you the special enmity of its own peculiar antagonists. These papers,
for instance, of mine, not being political, were read possibly in a
friendly temper by the regular supporters of the journal that published
them. But some of my own political friends regarded me with displeasure
for connecting myself at all with a reforming journal. And far more, who
would have been liberal enough to disregard that objection, naturally
lost sight of me when under occultation to _them_ in a journal which they
never saw.

[3] The crime of Josephus in relation to Christianity is the same, in
fact, as that of Lauder in respect to Milton. It was easy enough to
detect plagiarisms in the "Paradise Lost" from Latin passages fathered
upon imaginary writers, when these passages had previously been forged by
Lauder himself for the purpose of sustaining such a charge.

[4] It is a significant fact, that Dr. Strauss, whose sceptical spirit,
left to its own disinterested motions, would have looked through and
through this monstrous fable of Essenism, coolly adopted it, no questions
asked, as soon as he perceived the value of it as an argument against
Christianity.

[5] "_Solitary road_."--The reader must remember that, until the seventh
century of our era, when Mahometanism arose, there was no _collateral_
history. Why there was none, why no Gothic, why no Parthian history, it
is for Rome to explain. We tax ourselves, and are taxed by others, with
many an imaginary neglect as regards India; but assuredly we cannot be
taxed with _that_ neglect. No part of our Indian empire, or of its
adjacencies, but has occupied the researches of our Oriental scholars.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.
  THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD
  DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES
  DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

CHAPTER II.
  INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE

CHAPTER III.
  INFANT LITERATURE

CHAPTER IV.
  THE FEMALE INFIDEL

CHAPTER V.
  I AM INTRODUCED TO THE WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL

CHAPTER VI.
  I ENTER THE WORLD

CHAPTER VII.
  THE NATION OF LONDON

CHAPTER VIII.
  DUBLIN

CHAPTER IX.
  FIRST REBELLION IN IRELAND

CHAPTER X.
  FRENCH INVASION OF IRELAND, AND SECOND REBELLION

CHAPTER XI.
  TRAVELLING

CHAPTER XII.
  MY BROTHER

CHAPTER XIII.
  PREMATURE MANHOOD




AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES.




CHAPTER I.

THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD.


About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my
life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, even within
the gates of recovered paradise, might merit a remembrance. "_Life is
finished!_" was the secret misgiving of my heart; for the heart of
infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to
any capital wound inflicted on the happiness. "_Life is finished!
Finished it is!_" was the hidden meaning that, half unconsciously to
myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as bells heard from a distance
on a summer evening seem charged at times with an articulate form of
words, some monitory message, that rolls round unceasingly, even so
for me some noiseless and subterraneous voice seemed to chant
continually a secret word, made audible only to my own heart--that
"now is the blossoming of life withered forever." Not that such words
formed themselves vocally within my ear, or issued audibly from my
lips; but such a whisper stole silently to my heart. Yet in what sense
could _that_ be true? For an infant not more than six years old, was
it possible that  the promises of life had been really blighted, or
its golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? Had I read Milton?
Had I heard Mozart? No. St. Peter's, the "Paradise Lost," the divine
melodies of "Don Giovanni," all alike were as yet unrevealed to me,
and not more through the accidents of my position than through the
necessity of my yet imperfect sensibilities. Raptures there might be
in arrear; but raptures are modes of _troubled_ pleasure. The peace,
the rest, the central security which belong to love that is past all
understanding,--these could return no more. Such a love, so
unfathomable,--such a peace, so unvexed by storms, or the fear of
storms,--had brooded over those four latter years of my infancy, which
brought me into special relations to my elder sister; she being at
this period three years older than myself. The circumstances which
attended the sudden dissolution of this most tender connection I will
here rehearse. And, that I may do so more intelligibly, I will first
describe that serene and sequestered position which we occupied in
life. [1]

Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon impassioned records,
is fatal to their effect--as being incompatible with that absorption
of spirit and that self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates
or can find a genial home. It would, therefore, to myself be exceedingly
painful that even a shadow, or so much as a _seeming_ expression of
that tendency, should creep into these reminiscences. And yet, on the
other hand, it is so impossible, without laying an injurious restraint
upon the natural movement of such a narrative, to prevent oblique
gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or
aristocratic elegance as surrounded my childhood, that on all accounts
I think it better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of
truth, in what order of society my family moved at the time from which
this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it might happen that,
merely by reporting faithfully the facts of this early experience, I
could hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of
some higher rank than did really belong to my family. And this
impression might seem to have been designedly insinuated by myself.

My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means
a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar,
but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he
was a man engaged in _foreign_ commerce, and no other; therefore, in
_wholesale_ commerce, and no other--which last limitation of the idea
is important, because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's
condescending distinction [2] as one who ought  to be despised certainly,
but not too intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He--this
imperfectly despicable man--died at an early age, and very soon after the
incidents recorded in this chapter, leaving to his family, then
consisting of a wife and six children, an unburdened estate producing
exactly sixteen hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date
of my narrative,--whilst he was still living,--he had an income very much
larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man
who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it will
readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class--opulent,
though not emphatically _rich_ in a mercantile estimate--the domestic
economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of liberality altogether
unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations. The
establishment of servants, for instance, in such houses, measured even
_numerically_ against those establishments in other nations, would
somewhat surprise the foreign appraiser, simply as interpreting the
relative station in society occupied by the English merchant. But this
same establishment, when measured by the quality and amount of the
provision made for its comfort and even elegant accommodation, would fill
him with twofold astonishment, as interpreting equally the social
valuation of the English merchant, and also the social valuation of the
English servant; for, in the truest sense, England is the paradise of
household servants. Liberal housekeeping, in fact, as extending itself to
the meanest servants, and the disdain of petty parsimonies, are peculiar
to England. And in this respect the families of English merchants, as a
class, far outrun the scale of expenditure prevalent, not only amongst
the corresponding bodies of continental nations, but even amongst the
poorer sections of our own nobility--though confessedly the most
splendid in Europe;  a fact which, since the period of my infancy, I
have had many personal opportunities for verifying both in England and
in Ireland. From this peculiar anomaly, affecting the domestic economy
of English merchants, there arises a disturbance upon the usual scale
for measuring the relations of rank. The equation, so to speak, between
rank and the ordinary expressions of rank, which usually runs parallel
to the graduations of expenditure, is here interrupted and confounded,
so that one rank would be collected from the name of the occupation, and
another rank, much higher, from the splendor of the domestic _ménage_.
I warn the reader, therefore, (or, rather, my explanation has already
warned him,) that he is not to infer, from any casual indications of
luxury or elegance, a corresponding elevation of rank.

We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the very happiest
tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
Agur--"Give me neither poverty nor riches"--was realized for us. That
blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we
were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple
dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply
furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means
of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the
other hand, we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed
by the consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into
restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had
no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful also to this
hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained
to a Spartan simplicity of diet--that we fared, in fact, very much
less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence  for all
the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single
out as worthy of special commemoration--that I lived in a rustic
solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings
were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic
brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of
a pure, holy, and magnificent church.

       *       *       *       *       *

The earliest incidents in my life, which left stings in my memory so
as to be remembered at this day, were two, and both before I could
have completed my second year; namely, 1st, a remarkable dream of
terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to
myself for this reason--that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies
to have been constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum; [3] and,
2dly, the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the
reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses. This I mention
as inexplicable: for such annual resurrections of plants and flowers
affect us only as memorials, or suggestions of some higher change, and
therefore in connection with the idea of death; yet of death I could,
at that time, have had no experience whatever.

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two eldest sisters--
eldest of three _then_ living, and also elder than myself--were summoned
to an early death. The first  who died was Jane, about two years older
than myself. She was three and a half, I one and a half, more or less
by some trifle that I do not recollect. But death was then scarcely
intelligible to me, and I could not so properly be said to suffer
sorrow as a sad perplexity. There was another death in the house about
the same time, namely, of a maternal grandmother; but, as she had come
to us for the express purpose of dying in her daughter's society, and
from illness had lived perfectly secluded, our nursery circle knew her
but little, and were certainly more affected by the death (which I
witnessed) of a beautiful bird, viz., a kingfisher, which had been
injured by an accident. With my sister Jane's death (though otherwise,
as I have said, less sorrowful than perplexing) there was, however,
connected an incident which made a most fearful impression upon myself,
deepening my tendencies to thoughtfulness and abstraction beyond what
would seem credible for my years. If there was one thing in this world
from which, more than from any other, nature had forced me to revolt,
it was brutality and violence. Now, a whisper arose in the family that
a female servant, who by accident was drawn off from her proper duties
to attend my sister Jane for a day or two, had on one occasion treated
her harshly, if not brutally; and as this ill treatment happened within
three or four days of her death, so that the occasion of it must have
been some fretfulness in the poor child caused by her sufferings,
naturally there was a sense of awe and indignation diffused through
the family. I believe the story never reached my mother, and possibly
it was exaggerated; but upon me the effect was terrific. I did not
often see the person charged with this cruelty; but, when I did, my
eyes sought the ground; nor could I have borne to look her in the face;
not, however, in any spirit that could be called anger. The feeling
which fell upon me was a shuddering  horror, as upon a first glimpse
of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife. Though born in
a large town, (the town of Manchester, even then amongst the largest
of the island,) I had passed the whole of my childhood, except for the
few earliest weeks, in a rural seclusion. With three innocent little
sisters for playmates, sleeping always amongst them, and shut up forever
in a silent garden from all knowledge of poverty, or oppression, or
outrage, I had not suspected until this moment the true complexion of
the world in which myself and my sisters were living. Henceforward the
character of my thoughts changed greatly; for so _representative_ are
some acts, that one single case of the class is sufficient to throw
open before you the whole theatre of possibilities in that direction.
I never heard that the woman accused of this cruelty took it at all
to heart, even after the event which so immediately succeeded had
reflected upon it a more painful emphasis. But for myself, that incident
had a lasting revolutionary power in coloring my estimate of life.

So passed away from earth one of those three sisters that made up my
nursery playmates; and so did my acquaintance (if such it could be
called) commence with mortality. Yet, in fact, I knew little more of
mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but perhaps
she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious
immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was
sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would
come again. Summer and winter came again--crocuses and roses; why not
little Jane?

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant heart. Not
so the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample
brow, as often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I
fancy a _tiara_ of light or a gleaming aureola [4] in token of thy
premature intellectual grandeur,--thou whose head, for its superb
developments, was the astonishment of science, [5]--thou next, but after
an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned away from our
nursery; and the night, which for me gathered upon that event, ran after
my steps far into life; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for
good or for ill that which else I should have been. Pillar of fire that
didst go before me to guide and to quicken,--pillar of darkness, when
thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to
my dawning fears the  secret shadow of death,--by what mysterious
gravitation was it that _my_ heart had been drawn to thine? Could a
child, six years old, place any special value upon intellectual
forwardness? Serene and capacious as my sister's mind appeared to me
upon after review, was _that_ a charm for stealing away the heart of
an infant? O, no! I think of it _now_ with interest, because it lends,
in a stranger's ear, some justification to the excess of my fondness.
But then it was lost upon me; or, if not lost, was perceived only
through its effects. Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not the less
I must have loved thee, having that capacious heart--overflowing, even
as mine overflowed, with tenderness; stung, even as mine was stung,
by the necessity of loving and being loved. This it was which crowned
thee with beauty and power.

  "Love, the holy sense,
  Best gift of God, in thee was most intense."

That lamp of paradise was, for myself, kindled by reflection from the
living light which burned so steadfastly in thee; and never but to
thee, never again since _thy_ departure, had I power or temptation,
courage or desire, to utter the feelings which possessed me. For I was
the shyest of children; and, at all stages of life, a natural sense
of personal dignity held me back from exposing the least ray of feelings
which I was not encouraged _wholly_ to reveal.

It is needless to pursue, circumstantially, the course of that sickness
which carried off my leader and companion. She (according to my
recollection at this moment) was just as near to nine years as I to
six. And perhaps this natural precedency in authority of years and
judgment, united to the tender humility with which she declined to
assert it, had been amongst the fascinations of her presence. It was
upon  a Sunday evening, if such conjectures can be trusted, that the
spark of fatal fire fell upon that train of predispositions to a brain
complaint which had hitherto slumbered within her. She had been
permitted to drink tea at the house of a laboring man, the father of
a favorite female servant. The sun had set when she returned, in the
company of this servant, through meadows reeking with exhalations after
a fervent day. From that time she sickened. In such circumstances,
a child, as young as myself, feels no anxieties. Looking upon medical
men as people privileged, and naturally commissioned, to make war upon
pain and sickness, I never had a misgiving about the result. I grieved,
indeed, that my sister should lie in bed; I grieved still more to hear
her moan. But all this appeared to me no more than as a night of
trouble, on which the dawn would soon arise. O moment of darkness and
delirium, when the elder nurse awakened me from that delusion, and
launched God's thunderbolt at my heart in the assurance that my sister
MUST die! Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it "cannot
be _remembered_." [6] Itself, as a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in
its own chaos. Blank anarchy and confusion of mind fell upon me. Deaf and
blind I was, as I reeled under the revelation. I wish not to recall the
circumstances of that time, when _my_ agony was at its height, and
hers, in another sense, was approaching. Enough it is to say that all
was soon over; and, the morning of that day had at last arrived which
looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there
is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no
consolation.

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet  temple of her
brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I formed my own scheme for
seeing her once more. Not for the world would I have made this known,
nor have suffered a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of
feelings that take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a
possibility. But grief, even in a child, hates the light, and shrinks
from human eyes. The house was large enough to have two staircases;
and by one of these I knew that about midday, when all would be quiet,
(for the servants dined at one o'clock,) I could steal up into her
chamber. I imagine that it was about an hour after high noon when I
reached the chamber door: it was locked, but the key was not taken
away. Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although it opened
upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along
the silent walls. Then, turning round, I sought my sister's face. But
the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned towards myself.
Nothing met my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the
sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor.
The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the
express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold,
or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the
glory of life.

Let me pause in approaching a remembrance so affecting for my own mind,
to mention, that, in the "Opium Confessions," I endeavored to explain
the reason why death, other conditions remaining the same, is more
profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year--so
far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents
of scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the
antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the
frozen  sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt
with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us;
and, the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger
relief. But, in my case, there was even a subtler reason why the summer
had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of
death. And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more
of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed
combinations of _concrete_ objects, pass to us as _involutes_ (if I
may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being
disentangled, than ever reach us _directly_, and in their own abstract
shapes. It had happened, that amongst our vast nursery collection of
books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark
evenings, as my three sisters, with myself, sat by the firelight round
the _guard_ [7] of our nursery, no book was so much in request among us.
It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. Our younger nurse,
whom we all loved, would sometimes, according to her simple powers,
endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all
constitutionally touched with pensiveness: the fitful gloom and sudden
lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings;
and they suited, also, the divine revelations of power and mysterious
beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man,--man, and yet
_not_ man, real above all things, and yet shadowy above all things,--who
had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like
early dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief
differences in Oriental climates; and  all these differences (as it
happens) express themselves, more or less, in varying relations to the
great accidents and powers of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria--
those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears
of corn--that _must_ be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm
Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem.
"Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which masked another
peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were
they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies,
expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the
pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was
not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest
below all rest and of ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was
also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time
and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday
came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem.
What then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the _omphalos_ (navel)
or physical centre of the earth? Why should _that_ affect me? Such a
pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for a Grecian
city; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the
planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, yet of mortality;
for earth's tenant, Jerusalem, had now become the _omphalos_ and
absolute centre. Yet how? There, on the contrary, it was, as we infants
understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but,
for that very reason, there it was that mortality had opened its very
gloomiest crater. There it was, indeed, that the human had risen on
wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also it was that the
divine had been swallowed up by the abyss;   the lesser star could not
rise before the greater should submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore,
had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism,
but also as a phenomenon brought into intricate relations with death
by scriptual scenery and events.

Out of this digression, for the purpose of showing how inextricably
my feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer,
as connected with Palestine and Jerusalem, let me come back to the bed
chamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned around to
the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face;
and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features
had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead, indeed,--the
serene and noble forehead,--_that_ might be the same; but the frozen
eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the
marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating
the supplications of closing anguish,--could these be mistaken for
life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly
lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was _not_. I stood
checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood,
a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that ear ever heard.  It was
a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand
centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about
the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the
same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, [8] but saintly swell: it is in this
world the one great _audible_ symbol of eternity. And three times in my
life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances
--namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a
summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Aeolian intonation, when my eye
filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens
above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled
upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance
fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue
sky, a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows
that also ran up the shaft forever; and the billows seemed to pursue
the throne of God; but _that_ also ran before us and fled away
continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on forever and
ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel
me; some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to
evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them; shadowy
meanings even yet continued to exercise and torment, in dreams, the
deciphering oracle within me. I slept--for how long I cannot say:
slowly I recovered my self-possession; and, when I woke, found myself
standing, as before, close to my sister's bed.

I have reason to believe that a _very_ long interval had elapsed during
this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to
myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed;
for, if any body had detected me, means would have been taken to prevent
my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should
kiss no more, and slunk, like a guilty thing, with stealthy steps from
the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows
which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which
should have lasted forever; tainted thus with fear was that farewell
sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and to grief that could not
be healed.

O Abasuerus, everlasting Jew! [9] fable or not a fable, thou, when first
starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,--thou, when first flying
through the gates of Jerusalem, and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing
curse behind thee,--couldst not more certainly in the words of Christ
have read thy doom of endless sorrow, than I when passing forever from my
sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and, I may say, the worm that
could not die. Man is doubtless _one_ by some subtle _nexus_, some system
of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to
the superannuated dotard; but, as regards many affections and passions
incident to his nature at different stages, he is _not_ one, but an
intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew: the unity of man, in
this respect, is coextensive only with the particular stage to which the
passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by
one half of their origin, animal and earthly by the other half. These
will not survive their own appropriate stage. But love, which is
_altogether_ holy, like that between two children, is privileged to
revisit by glimpses the silence and the darkness of declining years; and,
possibly, this final experience in my sister's bed room, or some other in
which her innocence was concerned, may rise again for me to illuminate
the clouds of death.

On the day following this which I have recorded came a body of medical
men to examine the brain and the particular nature of the complaint,
for in some of its symptoms it had shown perplexing anomalies. An hour
after the strangers had withdrawn, I crept again to the room; but the
door was now locked, the key had been taken away, and I was shut out
forever.

Then came the funeral. I, in the ceremonial character of _mourner_,
was carried thither. I was put into a carriage with some gentlemen
whom I did not know. They were kind and attentive to me; but naturally
they talked of  things disconnected with the occasion, and their
conversation was a torment. At the church, I was told to hold a white
handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy! What need had _he_ of masks
or mockeries, whose heart died within him at every word that was
uttered? During that part of the service which passed within the church,
I made an effort to attend; but I sank back continually into my own
solitary darkness, and I heard little consciously, except some fugitive
strains from the sublime chapter of St. Paul, which in England is
always read at burials. [10]

Lastly came that magnificent liturgical service which the English
church performs at the side of the grave; for this church does not
forsake her dead so long as they continue in the upper air, but waits
for her last "sweet and solemn [11] farewell" at the side of the grave.
There is exposed once again, and for the last time, the coffin. All eyes
survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from
earth--records how shadowy! and dropped into darkness as if messages
addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual,
tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after
peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its
home; it has disappeared from all eyes but those that look down into the
abyss of the grave. The sacristan stands ready, with his shovel of earth
and stones. The priest's voice is heard once more,--_earth to  earth_,--
and immediately the dread rattle ascends from the lid of the coffin;
_ashes to ashes_--and again the killing sound is heard; _dust to dust_--
and the farewell volley announces that the grave, the coffin, the face
are sealed up forever and ever.

Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it
is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds.
Thou shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou
sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. Among the
very foremost of mine was morbid sensibility to shame. And, ten years
afterwards, I used to throw my self-reproaches  with regard to that
infirmity into this shape, viz., that if I were summoned to seek aid
for a perishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that aid only
by facing a vast company of critical or sneering faces, I might,
perhaps, shrink basely from the duty. It is true that no such case had
ever actually occurred; so that it was a mere romance of casuistry to
tax myself with cowardice so shocking. But, to feel a doubt, was to
feel condemnation; and the crime that _might_ have been was, in my
eyes, the crime that _had_ been. Now, however, all was changed; and
for any thing which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received
a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw
a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of
love--yes, slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his skin.
Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was
hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced, bleating
clamorously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. Not less
was the change in myself. Fifty thousand sneering faces would not have
troubled me _now_ in any office of tenderness to my sister's memory.
Ten legions would not   have repelled me from seeking her, if there
had been a chance that she could be found. Mockery! it was lost upon
me. Laughter! I valued it not. And when I was taunted insultingly with
"my girlish tears," that word "_girlish_" had no sting for me, except
as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart--that a girl
was the sweetest thing which I, in my short life, had known; that a
girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to
my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world,
I was to drink no more.

Now began to unfold themselves the consolations of solitude, those
consolations which only I was destined to taste; now, therefore, began
to open upon me those fascinations of solitude, which, when acting as
a co-agency with unresisted grief, end in the paradoxical result of
making out of grief itself a luxury; such a luxury as finally becomes
a snare, overhanging life itself, and the energies of life, with growing
menaces.  All deep feelings of a _chronic_ class agree in this, that
they seek for solitude, and are fed by solitude. Deep grief, deep love,
how naturally do these ally themselves with religious feeling! and all
three--love, grief, religion--are haunters of solitary places. Love,
grief, and the mystery of devotion,--what were these without solitude?
All day long, when it was not impossible for me to do so, I sought the
most silent and sequestered nooks in the grounds about the house or
in the neighboring fields. The awful stillness oftentimes of summer
noons, when no winds were abroad, the appealing silence of gray or
misty afternoons,--these were fascinations as of witchcraft.  Into the
woods, into the desert air, I gazed, as if some comfort lay hid in
_them_. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks.
Obstinately I tormented the blue depths with my scrutiny, sweeping
them forever with my eyes, and searching them  for one angelic face
that might, perhaps, have permission to reveal itself for a moment.

At this time, and under this impulse of rapacious grief, that grasped
at what it could not obtain, the faculty of shaping images in the
distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings
of the heart, grew upon me in morbid excess. And I recall at the present
moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows,
or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient
basis for this creative faculty.

On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my family to church: it was
a church on the ancient model of England, having aisles, galleries,
[12] organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions
majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long litany, as
often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so,
where God is supplicated on behalf of "all sick persons and young
children," and that he would "show his pity upon all prisoners and
captives," I wept in secret; and raising my streaming eyes to the upper
windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a
spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The sides of the
windows were rich with storied glass; through the deep purples and
crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination
(from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries (from art and its
gorgeous coloring) of what is grandest in man. _There_ were the apostles
that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial
love to man. _There_ were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth
through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting
faces. _There_ were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had
glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst
this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from some
accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the
window, where the glass was _uncolored_, white, fleecy clouds sailing
over the azure depths of the sky: were it but a fragment or a hint of
such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it
grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white lawny curtains;
and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in
anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious
reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered
the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the
beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms
descended from the heavens, that he and his young children, whom in
Palestine, once and forever, he had blessed, though they _must_ pass
slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the
sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not
that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The
hint from the litany, the fragment from the clouds,--those and the
storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the
tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes
in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound,
fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir,--high in arches,
when it seemed to rise, surmounting and overriding the strife of the
vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into
unity,--sometimes I seemed to rise and walk triumphantly upon those
clouds which, but a moment before, I had looked up to as mementoes of
prostrate sorrow; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music,
felt of grief itself as of a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously
above the causes of grief.

God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk
in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to the
meditative heart by the truths and services of a national church, God
holds with children "communion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may
be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for
solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world _alone_;
all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God's
presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor
mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and
child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude,
therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child's heart,
is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has
passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he _has_
to pass: reflex of one solitude--prefiguration of another.

O burden of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his
being! in his birth, which _has_ been--in his life, which _is_--in his
death, which _shall_ be--mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and
art, and art to be; thou broodest, like the Spirit of God moving upon the
surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of
Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be
nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the
principles of all things, solitude for the meditating child is the
Agrippa's  mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude of
millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them.
Deep is the solitude of those who, under secret griefs, have none to pity
them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts
or darkness, have none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest
of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood under the passion
of sorrow--bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which
watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. O mighty
and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be, thy kingdom is
made perfect in the grave; but even over those that keep watch outside
the grave, like myself, an infant of six years old, thou stretchest out a
sceptre of fascination.

       *       *       *       *       *

DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES.

[_Notice to the reader_.--The sun, in rising or setting, would produce
little effect if he were defrauded of his rays and their infinite
reverberations. "Seen through a fog," says Sara Coleridge, the noble
daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "the golden, beaming sun looks
like a dull orange, or a red billiard ball."--_Introd. to Biog. Lit._,
p. clxii. And, upon this same analogy, psychological experiences of
deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness of expression
when they are reverberated from dreams. The reader must, therefore,
suppose me at Oxford; more than twelve years are gone by; I am in the
glory of youth: but I have now first tampered with opium; and now first
the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength; now first they
swept in upon the brain with power, and the grandeur of recovered
life.]

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood
expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning
to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the
elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon
some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea
towering amongst her children in the nursery at Corinth, [13] smote me
senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's
corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer,
the Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself mysteriously
within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds itself continually the
trance in my sister's chamber--the blue heavens, the everlasting vault,
the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the thought (but not the
sight) of "_Who_ might sit thereon;" the flight, the pursuit, the
irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral
procession gathers; the priest, in his white surplus, stands waiting with
a book by the side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his
shovel; the coffin has sunk; the _dust to dust_ has descended. Again I
was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight of
God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his saints; the
fragment from the litany, the fragment from the clouds, awoke again the
lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens--awoke again the shadowy
arms that moved downward to meet them. Once again arose the swell of the
anthem, the burst of the hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling
movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling
sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ. Once more I,
that wallowed in the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now
all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted
into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high in heaven
hovered a gleaming host of faces, veiled with wings, around the pillows
of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with sorrow
that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the
children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only
to languish in tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

[In this instance the echoes, that rendered back the infant experience,
might be interpreted by the reader as connected with a _real_ ascent
of the Brocken; which was not the case. It was an ascent through all
its circumstances executed in dreams, which, under advanced stages in
the development of opium, repeat with marvellous accuracy the longest
succession of phenomena derived either from reading or from actual
experience. That softening and spiritualizing haze which belongs at
any rate to the action of dreams, and to the transfigurings worked
upon troubled remembrances by retrospects so vast as those of fifty
years, was in this instance greatly aided to my own feelings by the
alliance with the ancient phantom of the forest mountain in North
Germany. The playfulness of the scene is the very evoker of the solemn
remembrances that lie hidden below. The half-sportive interlusory
revealings of the symbolic tend to the same effect. One part of the
effect from the symbolic is dependent upon the great catholic principle
of the _Idem in alio_. The symbol restores the theme, but under new
combinations of form or coloring; gives back, but changes; restores,
but idealizes.]

Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the Brocken of North Germany.
The dawn opened in cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but,
as the hours advanced, her youngest sister April, that sometimes cares
little for racing across both frontiers of May,--the rearward frontier,
and the vanward frontier,--frets the bridal lady's sunny temper with
sallies of wheeling and careering showers, flying and pursuing, opening
and closing, hiding and restoring. On such a morning, and reaching
the summits of the forest mountain about sunrise, we shall have one
chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of the Brocken. [14] Who
and what is he?  He is a solitary apparition, in the sense of loving
solitude; else he is not always solitary in his personal manifestations,
but, on proper occasions, has been known to unmask a strength quite
sufficient to alarm those who had been insulting him.

Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious apparition, we
will try two or three experiments upon him. What we fear, and with
some reason, is, that, as he lived so many ages with foul pagan
sorcerers, and witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries, his
heart may have been corrupted, and that even now his faith may be
wavering or impure. We will try.

Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether he repeats it, (as on
Whitsunday [15] he surely ought to do.) Look! he _does_ repeat it; but
these driving April showers perplex the images, and _that_, perhaps, it
is which gives him the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively. Now,
again, the sun shines more brightly, and the showers have all swept off
like squadrons of cavalry to the rear. We will try him again.

Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones which once was called the
sorcerer's flower, [16] and bore a part, perhaps, in this horrid ritual
of fear; carry it to that stone which mimics the outline of a heathen
altar, and once was called the sorcerer's altar; [16] then, bending your
knee, and raising your right hand to God, say, "Father which art in
heaven, this lovely anemone, that once glorified the worship of fear, has
travelled back into thy fold; this altar, which once reeked with bloody
rites to Cortho, has long been rebaptized into thy holy service. The
darkness is gone; the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred; the moans
have passed away which the victims uttered; the cloud has vanished which
once sat continually upon their graves--cloud of protestation that
ascended forever to thy throne from the tears of the defenceless, and
from the anger of the just. And lo! we--I thy servant, and this dark
phantom, whom for one hour on this thy festival of Pentecost I make _my_
servant--render thee united worship in this thy recovered temple."

Lo! the apparition plucks an anemone, and places it on the altar; he
also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is;
but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs to
you, that perhaps on this high festival of the Christian church he may
have been overruled by supernatural influence into confession of his
homage, having so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous
rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. Let us try him,
therefore, with an earthly passion, where he will have no bias either
from favor or from fear.

If, then, once in childhood you suffered an affliction that was
ineffable,--if once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you were
summoned to fight with the tiger that couches within the separations
of the grave,--in that case, after the example of Judaea, [17] sitting
under her palm tree to weep, but sitting with her head veiled, do you
also veil your head. Many years are passed away since then; and perhaps
you were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above six years
old. But your heart was deeper than the Danube; and, as was your love, so
was your grief. Many years are gone since that darkness settled on your
head; many summers, many winters; yet still its shadows wheel round upon
you at intervals, like these April showers upon this glory of bridal
June. Therefore now, on this dove-like morning of Pentecost, do you veil
your head like Judaea in memory of that transcendent woe, and in
testimony that, indeed, it surpassed all utterance of words. Immediately
you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils _his_ head, after the
model of Judaea weeping under her palm tree, as if he also had a human
heart; and as if _he_ also, in childhood, having suffered an affliction
which was ineffable, wished by these mute symbols to breathe a sigh
towards heaven in memory of that transcendent woe, and by way of record,
though many a year after, that it was indeed unutterable by words.


FOOTNOTES

[1] As occasions arise in these Sketches, when, merely for the purposes
of intelligibility, it becomes requisite to call into notice such
personal distinctions in my family as otherwise might be unimportant, I
here record the entire list of my brothers and sisters, according to
their order of succession; and Miltonically I include myself; having
surely as much logical right to count myself in the series of my own
brothers as Milton could have to pronounce Adam the goodliest of his own
sons. First and last, we counted as eight children, viz., four brothers
and four sisters, though never counting more than six living at once,
viz., 1. _William_, older than myself by more than five years; 2.
_Elizabeth_; 3. _Jane_, who died in her fourth year; 4. _Mary_; 5.
myself, certainly not the goodliest man of men since born my brothers; 6.
_Richard_, known to us all by the household name of _Pink_, who in his
after years tilted up and down what might then be called his Britannic
majesty's oceans (viz., the Atlantic and Pacific) in the quality of
midshipman, until Waterloo in one day put an extinguisher on that whole
generation of midshipmen, by extinguishing all further call for their
services; 7. a second _Jane_; 8. _Henry_, a posthumous child, who
belonged to Brazennose College, Oxford, and died about his twenty-sixth
year.

[2] Cicero, in a well-known passage of his "Ethics", speaks of trade as
irredeemably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if
wholesale.

[3] It is true that in those days _paregoric elixir_ was occasionally
given to children in colds; and in this medicine there is a small
proportion of laudanum. But no medicine was ever administered to any
member of our nursery except under medical sanction; and this, assuredly,
would not have been obtained to the exhibition of laudanum in a case such
as mine. For I was then not more that twenty-one months old: at which age
the action of opium is capricious, and therefore perilous.

[4] "_Aureola_."--The _aureola_ is the name given in the "Legends of the
Christian  Saints" to that golden diadem or circlet of supernatural light
(that _glory_, as it is commonly called in English) which, amongst the
great masters of painting in Italy, surrounded the heads of Christ and of
distinguished saints.

[5] "_The astonishment of science_."--Her medical attendants were Dr.
Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent
of Condorcet, D'Alembert,  &c., and Mr. Charles White, the most
distinguished surgeon at  that time in the north of England. It was he
who pronounced her head to be the finest in its development of any that
he had ever seen--an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in
after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the
subject may be presumed from this, that, at so early a stage of such
inquiries, he had published a work on human craniology, supported by
measurement of heads selected from all varieties of the human species.
Meantime, as it would grieve me that any trait of what might seem vanity
should creep into this record, I will admit that my sister died of
hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature
expansion of the intellect in cases of that class is altogether morbid--
forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would,
however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation
between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease
may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but,
inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and
outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the
disease.

[6]
  "I stood in unimaginable trance
  And agony which cannot be remembered."
     _Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's Remorse_

[7] "_The guard_."--I know not whether the word is a local one in this
sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five feet high, which
locks up the fire from too near an approach on the part of children.

[8] "_Memnonian_."--For the sake of many readers, whose hearts may go
along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, but whose course of life
has not allowed them much leisure for study, I pause to explain--that the
head of Memnon, in the British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon
its lips a smile coextensive with all time and all space, an Aeonian
smile of gracious love and Pan-like mystery, the most diffusive and
pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is represented, on
the authority of ancient traditions, to have uttered at sunrise, or soon
after as the sun's rays had accumulated heat enough to rarefy the air
within certain cavities in the bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of
intonations; the simple explanation being, in its general outline, this--
that sonorous currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold
and heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and
therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure of
heavier air. Currents being thus established by artificial arrangements
of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be concerted and sustained.
Near the Red Sea lies a chain of sand hills, which, by a natural system
of grooves inosculating with each other, become vocal under changing
circumstances in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon
observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his
daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was
passing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying
slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded
a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple
phenomenon is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly
as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden tube, yields a
stridulous and plaintive sound compared with the full volume of sound
corresponding to the full volume of water, on parity of principles,
nobody will doubt that the current of blood pouring through the tubes of
the human frame will utter to the learned ear, when armed with the
stethoscope, an elaborate gamut or compass of music recording the ravages
of disease, or the glorious plenitudes of health, as faithfully as the
cavities within this ancient Memnonian bust reported this mighty event of
sunrise to the rejoicing world of light and life; or, again, under the
sad passion of the dying day, uttered the sweet requiem that belonged to
its departure.

[9] "_Everlasting Jew_."--_Der ewige Jude_--which is the common German
expression for "The Wandering Jew," and sublimer even than our own.

[10] First Epistle to Corinthians, chap. xv., beginning at ver. 20.

[11] This beautiful expression, I am pretty certain, must belong to Mrs.
Trollope; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers connected with the
backwoods of America, where the absence of such a farewell must
unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any rate belonging to a  household
separation of that eternal character occurring amongst the shadows of
those mighty forests.

[12] "_Galleries_."--These, though condemned on some grounds by the
restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one
advantage--that, when the _height_ of a church is that dimension which
most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and
interpret that height.

[13] Euripides.

[14] "_Spectre of the Brocken_."--This very striking phenomenon has been
continually described by writers, both German and English, for the last
fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met with these
descriptions; and on _their_ account I add a few words in explanation,
referring them for the best scientific comment on the case to Sir David
Brewster's "Natural Magic." The spectre takes the shape of a human
figure, or, if the visitors are more than one, then the spectres
multiply; they arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the
dark ground of any clouds that may be in the right quarter, or perhaps
they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of
some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from
the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the
appearances to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is
surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked, and wakens to
the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself.
This Titan amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious,
vanishing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in
coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he is seen so
seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions under which only
the phenomenon can be manifested; the sun must be near to the horizon,
(which, of itself, implies a time of day inconvenient to a person
starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode;) the spectator must
have his back to the sun; and the air must contain some vapor, but
_partially_ distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday
of 1799, with a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to
see the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the three same
conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the
following lines:--

    "Such thou art as when
  The woodman winding westward up the glen
  At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze
  The viewless snow mist weaves a glistening haze,
  Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
  An image with a glory round its head;
  This shade he worships for its golden hues,
  And _makes_ (not knowing) that which he pursues."

[15] "_On Whitsunday_."--It is singular, and perhaps owing to the
temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of summer,
that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday
than on any other day.

[16] "_The sorcerer's flower_," and "_The sorcerer's altar_."--These are
names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar-
shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and there is no doubt
that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition,
with the gloomy realities of paganism, when the whole Hartz and the
Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but
perishing idolatry.

[17] On the Roman coins.




CHAPTER II.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE.


So, then, one chapter in my life had finished. Already, before the
completion of my sixth year, this first chapter had run its circle,
had rendered up its music to the final chord--might seem even, like
ripe fruit from a tree, to have detached itself forever from all the
rest of the arras that was shaping itself within my loom of life. No
Eden of lakes and forest lawns, such as the _mirage_ suddenly evokes
in Arabian sands,--no pageant of air-built battlements and towers,
that ever burned in dream-like silence amongst the vapors of summer
sunsets, mocking and repeating with celestial pencil "the fuming
vanities of earth,"--could leave behind it the mixed impression of so
much truth combined with so much absolute delusion. Truest of all
things it seemed by the excess of that happiness which it had sustained:
most fraudulent it seemed of all things, when looked back upon as some
mysterious parenthesis in the current of life, "self-withdrawn into
a wonderous depth," hurrying as if with headlong malice to extinction,
and alienated by _every_ feature from the new aspects of life that
seemed to await me. Were it not in the bitter corrosion of heart that
I was called upon to face, I should have carried over to the present
no connecting link whatever from the past. Mere reality in this
fretting it was, and the undeniableness of its too potent remembrances,
that forbade me to regard this burned-out inaugural chapter of my life
as no chapter at all, but a pure exhalation of dreams. Misery is a
guaranty of truth too substantial to be refused; else, by its
determinate evanescence, the total experience would have worn the
character of a fantastic illusion.

Well it was for me at this period, if well it were for me to live at
all, that from any continued contemplation of my misery I was forced
to wean myself, and suddenly to assume the harness of life. Else under
the morbid languishing of grief, and of what the Romans called
_desiderium_, (the yearning too obstinate after one irrecoverable
face,) too probably I should have pined away into an early grave. Harsh
was my awaking; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking administered
broke the strength of my sickly reveries through a period of more than
two years; by which time, under the natural expansion of my bodily
strength, the danger had passed over.

In the first chapter I have rendered solemn thanks for having been
trained amongst the gentlest of sisters, and not under "horrid
pugilistic brothers." Meantime, one such brother I had, senior by much
to myself, and the stormiest of his class: him I will immediately
present to the reader; for up to this point of my narrative he may be
described as a stranger even to myself. Odd as it sounds, I had at
this time both a brother and a father, neither of whom would have been
able to challenge me as a relative, nor I _him_, had we happened to
meet on the public roads.

In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived
abroad for a space that, measured against _my_ life, was a very long
one. First, he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra;
next in Madeira; then  in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica,
sometimes in St. Kitt's; courting the supposed benefit of hot climates
in his complaint of pulmonary consumption. He had, indeed, repeatedly
returned to England, and met my mother at watering-places on the south
coast of Devonshire, &c. But I, as a younger child, had not been one
of the party selected for such excursions from home. And now, at last,
when all had proved unavailing, he was coming home to die amongst his
family, in his thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to await his
arrival at the port (whatever port) to which the West India packet
should bring him; and amongst the deepest recollections which I connect
with that period, is one derived from the night of his arrival at
Greenhay.

It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants, and four
of us children, were gathered for hours, on the lawn before the house,
listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came--nine, ten, eleven
o'clock, and nearly another hour had passed--without a warning sound;
for Greenhay, being so solitary a house, formed a _terminus ad quem_,
beyond which was nothing but a cluster of cottages, composing the
little hamlet of Greenhill; so that any sound of wheels coming from
the winding lane which then connected us with the Rusholme Road, carried
with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare for visitors at
Greenhay. No such summons had yet reached us; it was nearly midnight;
and, for the last time, it was determined that we should move in a
body out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting the travelling party,
if, at so late an hour, it could yet be expected to arrive. In fact,
to our general surprise, we met it almost immediately, but coming at
so slow a pace, that the fall of the horses' feet was not audible until
we were close upon them. I mention the case for the sake of the undying
impressions which connected themselves with the circumstances. The
first notice of the approach was the sudden emerging of horses' heads
from the deep gloom of the shady lane; the next was the mass of white
pillows against which the dying patient was reclining. The hearse-like
pace at which the carriage moved recalled the overwhelming spectacle
of that funeral which had so lately formed part in the most memorable
event of my life. But these elements of awe, that might at any rate
have struck forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, in my
condition of morbid nervousness, raised into abiding grandeur by the
antecedent experiences of that particular summer night. The listening
for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising
and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such fitful
airs as might be stirring--the peculiar solemnity of the hours
succeeding to sunset--the glory of the dying day--the gorgeousness
which, by description, so well I knew of sunset in those West Indian
islands from which my father was returning--the knowledge that he
returned only to die--the almighty pomp in which this great idea of
Death apparelled itself to my young sorrowing heart--the corresponding
pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life,
rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries
that seemed even _more_ solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and
trophies of mortality,--all this chorus of restless images, or of
suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been
fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar
of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams.
This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's
image to me as a personal reality; otherwise he would have been for
me a bare _nominis umbra_. He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a
sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my repose
of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him throughout his
waking hours. I was also present at his bedside in the closing hour
of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious
conversation with some imaginary visitors.

My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen,
but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an
early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His
genius for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was a divine _afflatus_
which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding
in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create
them, as a _nephelaegereta Zeus_, a cloud-compelling Jove, in order that
he _might_ direct them. For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to
the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincolnshire--one of those many old
classic institutions which form the peculiar [1] glory of England. To
box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in
those days a mere necessity of schoolboy life at _public_ schools; and
hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control of those
generally who had benefited by such discipline--so systematically hostile
to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his
"Tyrocinium," is far from doing justice to our great public schools.
Himself disqualified, by a delicacy of temperament, for reaping the
benefits from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own
Westminster experience, he could not judge them from an impartial
station; but I, though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet
having tried both classes of schools, public and private, am compelled in
mere conscience to give my vote (and, if I had a thousand votes, to give
_all_ my votes) for the former.

Fresh from such a training as this, and at a time when his additional
five or six years availed nearly to make _his_ age the double of mine,
my brother very naturally despised me; and, from his exceeding
frankness, he took no pains to conceal that he did. Why should he? Who
was it that could have a right to feel aggrieved by this contempt?
Who, if not myself? But it happened, on the contrary, that I had a
perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt
a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing. Why not?
Wherefore should any rational person shrink from contempt, if it happen
to form the tenure by which he holds his repose in life? The cases
which are cited from comedy of such a yearning after contempt, stand
upon a footing altogether different: _there_ the contempt is wooed as
a serviceable ally and tool of religious hypocrisy. But to me, at that
era of life, it formed the main guaranty of an unmolested repose; and
security there was not, on any lower terms, for the _latentis semita
vitae_. The slightest approach to any favorable construction of my
intellectual pretensions alarmed me beyond measure; because it pledged
me in a manner with the hearer to support this first attempt by a
second, by a third, by a fourth--O Heavens! there is no saying how far
the horrid man might go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned
under the weight of his expectations; and, if I laid but the first
round of such a staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's
ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after
league; and myself running up and down this ladder, like any fatigue
party of Irish hodmen, to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer
might choose to build. But I nipped the abominable system of extortion
in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could
have no pretence, you know, for expecting me to climb the third or
fourth round, when I had seemed quite unequal to the first. Professing
the most absolute bankruptcy from the very beginning, giving the man
no sort of hope that I would pay even one farthing in the pound, I
never could be made miserable by unknown responsibilities.

Still, with all this passion for being despised, which was so essential
to my peace of mind, I found at times an altitude--a starry
altitude--in the station of contempt for me assumed by my brother that
nettled me. Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried
me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the staircase
of Babel, that my brother was shaken for a moment in the infinity of
his contempt; and before long, when my superiority in some bookish
accomplishments displayed itself, by results that could not be entirely
dissembled, mere foolish human nature forced me into some trifle of
exultation at these retributory triumphs. But more often I was disposed
to grieve over them. They tended to shake that solid foundation of
utter despicableness upon which I relied so much for my freedom from
anxiety; and therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind
that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation,
gravitated determinately back towards that settled contempt which had
been the result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon
which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two--1st, my
physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he assumed, and even
postulated as a _datum_, which I myself could never have the face to
refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually,
he looked upon me as below notice; but, _morally_, he assured me that
he would give me a written character of the very best description,
whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're
willing, though lazy; you _would_ pull, if you had the strength of a
flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own
demurs to these harsh judgments were not so many as they might have
been. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not
uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in a majority of
cases, I really _was_; and there were more reasons for thinking so
than the reader is yet aware of. But, as to the effeminacy, I denied
it _in toto_; and with good reason, as will be seen. Neither did my
brother pretend to have any experimental proofs of it. The ground he
went upon was a mere _a priori_ one, viz., that I had always been tied
to the apron string of women or girls; which amounted at most to
this--that, by training and the natural tendency of circumstances, I
_ought_ to be effeminate; that is, there was reason to expect beforehand
that I _should_ be so; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in spite
of such reasonable presumptions, I really were _not_. In fact, my
brother soon learned, by a daily experience, how entirely he might
depend upon me for carrying out the most audacious of his own warlike
plans--such plans, it is true, that I abominated; but _that_ made no
difference in the fidelity with which I tried to fulfil them.

This eldest brother of mine was in all respects a remarkable boy. Haughty
he was, aspiring, immeasurably active; fertile in resources as Robinson
Crusoe; but also full of quarrel as it is possible to imagine; and, in
default of any other opponent, he would have fastened a quarrel upon his
own shadow for presuming to run before him when going westwards in the
morning, whereas, in all reason, a shadow, like a dutiful child, ought to
keep deferentially in the rear of that majestic substance which is the
author of its existence. Books he detested, one and all, excepting only
such as he happened to write himself. And these were not a few. On all
subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English
church down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, both black and white,
thaumaturgy, and necromancy, he favored the world (which world was the
nursery where I lived amongst my sisters) with his select opinions. On
this last subject especially--of necromancy--he was very great: witness
his profound work, though but a fragment, and, unfortunately, long since
departed to the bosom of Cinderella, entitled "How to raise a Ghost; and
when you've got him down, how to keep him down." To which work he assured
us that some most learned and enormous man, whose name was a foot and a
half long, had promised him an appendix, which appendix treated of the
Red Sea and Solomon's signet ring, with forms of _mittimus_ for ghosts
that might be refractory, and probably a riot act, for any _émeute_
amongst ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he often thrilled our
young hearts by supposing the case, (not at all unlikely, he affirmed,)
that a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place
amongst the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation
of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth. The Roman phrase
for expressing that a man had died, viz., "_Abiit ad plures_" (He has
gone over to the majority,) my brother explained to us; and we easily
comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if
combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by
comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trot this earth
before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a
miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the
Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing
in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far
enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated
this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly
predecessors, by the awful apparition which at three o'clock in the
afternoon, on the 18th of June, 1815, the mighty contest at Waterloo must
have assumed to eyes that watched over the trembling interests of man.
The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was
thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and
contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams,
how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear
at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount
of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom
that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it
seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the harvest of
possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it.
And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been
_proved_ to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, indeed, in a work of
two octavo volumes, has endeavored to show that a conspiracy was traced
at Waterloo, between two or three foreign regiments, for kindling a panic
in the heat of battle, by flight, and by a sustained blowing up of
tumbrils, under the miserable purpose of shaking the British steadiness.
But the evidences are not clear; whereas my brother insisted that the
presence of sham men, distributed extensively amongst the human race, and
meditating treason against us all, had been demonstrated to the
satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were these shams and make-
believe men? They were, in fact, people that had been dead for centuries,
but that, for reasons best known to themselves, had returned to this
upper earth, walked about amongst us, and were undistinguishable, except
by the most learned of necromancers, from authentic men of flesh and
blood. I mention this for the sake of illustrating the fact, of which the
reader will find a singular instance in the foot note attached, that the
same crazes are everlastingly revolving upon men. [2]

This hypothesis, however, like a thousand others, when it happened
that they engaged no durable sympathy from his nursery audience, he
did not pursue. For some time he turned his thoughts to philosophy,
and read lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of
physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring
flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling. "Poh!" he said,
"they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as
it ought to be done. Ah! you should see _me_ standing upright on the
ceiling, with my head downwards, for half an hour together, and
meditating profoundly." My sister Mary remarked, that we should all
be very glad to see him in that position. "If that's the case," he
replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to a strap or
two." Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, if held
up until he had started, he might then, by taking a bold sweep ahead,
keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating. But
this he found not to answer; because, as he observed, "the friction
was too retarding from the plaster of Paris, but the case would be
very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was _not_,
he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he
would consider himself in the light of a humming top; he would make
an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top,
upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of
the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of
course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis--perhaps
he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the
flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made any thing
of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said,
if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from
doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of,"
was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled
upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The
apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would
not work--a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On
reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some
amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete,
he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a _humming_ top that was required,
but a peg top. Now, this, in order to keep up the _vertigo_ at full
stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too
much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was precisely
what a gentleman ought not to tolerate: to be scourged unintermittingly
on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless it were father Adam
himself, was a thing that he could not bring his mind to face. However,
as some compensation, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which
was, as every body must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to
civilized society. As he had made many a fire balloon, and had succeeded
in some attempts at bringing down cats by _parachutes_, it was not
very difficult to fly downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he
was reproached by my sister for never flying back again,--which,
however, was a far different thing, and not even attempted by the
philosopher in "Rasselas,"--(for

  "Revocare gradum, et _superas_ evadere ad auras
  Hic labor, hoc opus est,")

he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try his winged parachutes
any more, either "aloft or alow," till he had thoroughly studied Bishop
Wilkins [3] on the art of translating right reverend gentlemen to the
moon; and, in the mean time, he resumed his general lectures on physics.
From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled
out, by a concerted assault of my sister Mary's. He had been in the habit
of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to
the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness
annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female
visitors, and my next younger brother,--in subsequent times a little
middy on board many a ship of H. M., and the most predestined rebel upon
earth against all assumptions, small or great, of superiority,--she
arranged a mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly
extinguishing the lectures forever. He had happened to say, what was no
unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point
under discussion tolerably clear; "clear," he added, bowing round the
half circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities;" and then
he repeated,  sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of
capacities." Upon which, a voice, a female voice,--but whose voice, in
the tumult that followed, I did not distinguish,--retorted, "No, you
haven't; it's as dark as sin; "and then, without a moment's interval, a
second voice exclaimed, "Dark as night;" then came my young brother's
insurrectionary yell, "Dark as midnight;" then another female voice
chimed in melodiously, "Dark as pitch;" and so the peal continued to come
round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling
fire so well sustained, that it was impossible to make head against it;
whilst the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting
character of an oral "round robin," it being impossible to challenge any
one in particular as the ringleader. Burke's phrase of "the swinish
multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and,
accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment
at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked
very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping  _fusillade_, and then
addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the
words _pearls_ and _swinish multitude_, but uttered in a very low key,
perhaps out of some lurking consideration for the two young strangers. We
all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my brother himself
condescended at last to join us; but there ended the course of lectures
on natural philosophy.

As it was impossible, however, that he should remain quiet, he announced
to us, that for the rest of his life he meant to dedicate himself to
the intense cultivation of the tragic drama. He got to work instantly;
and very soon he had composed the first act of his "Sultan Selim;"
but, in defiance of the metre, he soon changed the title to "Sultan
Amurath," considering _that_ a much fiercer name, more bewhiskered and
beturbaned. It was no part of his intention that we should sit lolling
on chairs like ladies and gentleman that had paid opera prices for
private boxes. He expected every one of us, he said, to pull an oar.
We were to _act_ the tragedy. But, in fact, we had many oars to pull.
There were so many characters, that each of us took four at the least,
and the future middy had six. He, this wicked little middy, [4] caused
the greatest affliction to Sultan Amurath, forcing him to order the
amputation of his head six several times (that is, once in every one of
his six parts) during the first act. In reality, the sultan, though
otherwise a decent man, was too bloody. What by the bowstring, and what
by the cimeter, he had so thinned the population with which he commenced
business, that scarcely any of the characters remained alive at the
end of act the first. Sultan Amurath found himself in an awkward
situation. Large arrears of work remained, and hardly any body to do
it but the sultan himself. In composing act the second, the author had
to proceed like Deucalion and Pyrrha, and to create an entirely new
generation. Apparently this young generation, that ought to have been
so good, took no warning by what had happened to their ancestors in
act the first: one must conclude that they were quite as wicked, since
the poor sultan had found himself reduced to order them all for
execution in the course of this act the second. To the brazen age had
succeeded an iron age; and the prospects were becoming sadder and
sadder as the tragedy advanced. But here the author began to hesitate.
He felt it hard to resist the instinct of carnage. And was it right
to do so? Which of the felons whom he had cut of prematurely could
pretend that a court of appeal would have reversed his sentence? But
the consequences were distressing. A new set of characters in every
act brought with it the necessity of a new plot; for people could not
succeed to the arrears of old actions, or inherit ancient motives,
like a landed estate. Five crops, in fact, must be taken off the ground
in each separate tragedy, amounting, in short, to five tragedies
involved in one.

Such, according to the rapid sketch which at this moment my memory
furnishes, was the brother who now first laid open to me the gates of
war. The occasion was this. He had resented, with a shower of stones, an
affront offered to us by an individual boy, belonging to a cotton
factory: for more than two years afterwards this became the _teterrima
causa_ of a skirmish or a battle as often as we passed the factory; and,
unfortunately, _that_ was twice a day on every day except Sunday. Our
situation in respect to the enemy was as follows: Greenhay, a country
house newly built by my father, at that time was a clear mile from the
outskirts of Manchester; but in after years Manchester, throwing out the
_tentacula_ of its vast expansions, absolutely enveloped Greenhay; and,
for any thing I know, the grounds and gardens which then insulated the
house may have long disappeared. Being a modest mansion, which (including
hot walls, offices, and gardener's house) had cost only six thousand
pounds, I do not know how it should have risen to the distinction of
giving name to a region of that great town; however, it _has_ done so;
[5] and at this time, therefore, after changes so great, it will be
difficult for the _habitué_ of that region to understand how my brother
and myself could have a solitary road to traverse between Greenhay and
Princess Street, then the termination, on that side, of Manchester. But
so it was. Oxford _Street_, like its namesake in London, was then called
the Oxford _Road_; and during the currency of our acquaintance with it,
arose the first three houses in its neighborhood; of which the third was
built for the Rev. S. H., one of our guardians, for whom his friends had
also built the Church of St. Peter's--not a bowshot from the house. At
present, however, he resided in Salford, nearly two miles from Greenhay;
and to him we went over daily, for the benefit of his classical
instructions. One sole cotton factory had then risen along the line of
Oxford Street; and this was close to a bridge, which also was a new
creation; for previously all passengers to Manchester went round by
Garrat. This factory became to us the _officina gentium_, from which
swarmed forth those Goths and Vandals that continually threatened our
steps; and this bridge became the eternal arena of combat, we taking good
care to be on the right side of the bridge for retreat, _i.e._, on the
town side, or the country side, accordingly as we were going out in the
morning, or returning in the afternoon. Stones were the implements of
warfare; and by continual practice both parties became expert in throwing
them.

The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to rehearse, since the
particular accident which began it was not the true efficient cause
of our long warfare, but simply the casual occasion. The cause lay in
our aristocratic dress. As children of an opulent family, where all
provisions were liberal, and all appointments elegant, we were uniformly
well dressed; and, in particular, we wore troussers, (at that time
unheard of, except among sailors,) and we also wore Hessian boots--a
crime that could not be forgiven in the Lancashire of that day, because
it expressed the double offence of being aristocratic and being
outlandish. We were aristocrats, and it was vain to deny it; could
we deny our boots? whilst our antagonists, if not absolutely _sans
culottes_, were slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed,
with hair totally neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton.
Jacobins they were not, as regarded any sympathy with the Jacobinism
that then desolated France; for, on the contrary, they detested every
thing French, and answered with brotherly signals to the cry of "Church
and king," or "King and constitution." But, for all that, as they were
perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and these wages in a
mode of industry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they contrived
to reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a personal Jacobinism
of that sort which is native to the heart of man, who is by natural
impulse (and not without a root of nobility, though also of base envy)
impatient of inequality, and submits to it only through a sense of
its necessity, or under a long experience of its benefits.

It was on an early day of our new _tyrocinium_, or perhaps on the very
first, that, as we passed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from
the factory [6] sang out to us derisively, "Hollo, bucks!" In this the
reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the long
war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word "_dandies_" [7]
which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he
could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of
prophecy. _Buck_ was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester
vocabulary: he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But in the
next moment he discovered our boots, and he consummated his crime by
saluting us as "Boots! boots!" My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him
with intense disdain, and bade him draw near, that he might "give his
flesh to the fowls of the air." The boy declined to accept this
liberal invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most contemptuous and
plebian gesture, [8] upon which my brother drove him in with a shower
of stones.

During this inaugural flourish of hostilities, I, for my part, remained
inactive, and therefore apparently neutral. But this was the last time
that I did so: for the moment, indeed, I was taken by surprise. To be
called a _buck_ by one that had it in his choice to have called me a
coward, a thief, or a murderer, struck me as a most pardonable offence;
and as to _boots_, that rested upon a flagrant fact that could not be
denied; so that at first I was green enough to regard the boy as very
considerate and indulgent. But my brother soon rectified my views; or,
if any doubts remained, he impressed me, at least, with a sense of my
paramount duty to himself, which was threefold. First, it seems that
I owed military allegiant to _him_, as my commander-in-chief, whenever
we "took the field;" secondly, by the law of nations, I, being a cadet
of my house, owed suit and service to him who was its head; and he
assured me, that twice in a year, on _my_ birthday and on _his_, he
had a right, strictly speaking, to make me lie down, and to set his
foot upon my neck; lastly, by a law not so rigorous, but valid amongst
gentlemen,--viz., "by the _comity_ of nations,"--it seems I owed eternal
deference to one so much older than myself, so much wiser, stronger,
braver, more beautiful, and more swift of foot. Something like all
this in tendency I had already believed, though I had not so minutely
investigated the modes and grounds of my duty. By temperament, and
through natural dedication to despondency, I felt resting upon me
always too deep and gloomy a sense of obscure duties attached to life,
that I never _should_ be able to fulfil; a burden which I could not
carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off. Glad, therefore,
I was to find the whole tremendous weight of obligations--the law and
the prophets--all crowded into this one pocket command, "Thou shalt
obey thy brother as God's vicar upon earth." For now, if, by any future
stone levelled at him who had called me a "buck," I should chance to
draw blood, perhaps I might not have committed so serious a trespass
on any rights which he could plead; but if I _had_, (for on this subject
my convictions were still cloudy,) at any rate, the duty I might have
violated in regard to this general brother, in right of Adam, was
cancelled when it came into collision with my paramount duty to this
liege brother of my own individual house.

From this day, therefore, I obeyed all my brother's military commands
with the utmost docility; and happy it made me that every sort of
doubt, or question, or opening for demur was swallowed up in the unity
of this one papal principle, discovered by my brother, viz., that all
rights and duties of casuistry were transferred from me to himself.
_His_ was the judgment--_his_ was the responsibility; and to me belonged
only the sublime obligation of unconditional faith in _him_. That faith
I realized. It is true that he taxed me at times, in his reports of
particular fights, with "horrible cowardice," and even with "a cowardice
that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery." But
this was only a _façon de parler_ with him: the idea of secret perfidy,
that was constantly moving under ground, gave an interest to the
progress of the war, which else tended to the monotonous. It was a
dramatic artifice for sustaining the interest, where the incidents
might happen to be too slightly diversified. But that he did not believe
his own charges was clear, because he never repeated them in his
"General History of the Campaigns," which was a _resumé_, or
recapitulating digest, of his daily reports.

We fought every day, and, generally speaking, _twice_ every day; and
the result was pretty uniform, viz., that my brother and I terminated
the battle by insisting upon our undoubted right to run away. _Magna
Charta_, I should fancy, secures that great right to every man; else,
surely, it is sadly defective. But out of this catastrophe to most of
our skirmishes, and to all our pitched battles except one, grew a
standing schism between my brother and myself. My unlimited obedience
had respect to action, but not to opinion. Loyalty to my brother did
not rest upon hypocrisy: because I was faithful, it did not follow
that I must be false in relation to his capricious opinions. And these
opinions sometimes took the shape of acts. Twice, at the least, in
every week, but sometimes every night, my brother insisted on singing
"Te Deum" for supposed victories which he had won; and he insisted
also on my bearing a part in these "Te Deums." Now, as I knew of no
such victories, but resolutely asserted the truth,--viz., that we ran
away,--a slight jar was thus given to the else triumphal effect of
these musical ovations. Once having uttered my protest, however,
willingly I gave my aid to the chanting; for I loved unspeakably the
grand and varied system of chanting in the Romish and English churches.
And, looking back at this day to the ineffable benefits which I derived
from the church of my childhood, I account among the very greatest
those which reached me through the various chants connected with the
"O, Jubilate," the "Magnificat," the "Te Deum," the "Benedicite," &c.
Through these chants it was that the sorrow which laid waste my infancy,
and the devotion which nature had made a necessity of my being, were
profoundly interfused: the sorrow gave reality and depth to the
devotion; the devotion gave grandeur and idealization to the sorrow.
Neither was my love for chanting altogether without knowledge. A son
of my reverend guardian, much older than myself, who possessed a
singular faculty of producing a sort of organ accompaniment with one
half of his mouth, whilst he sang with the other half, had given me
some instructions in the art of chanting; and, as to my brother, he,
the hundred-handed Briareus, could do all things; of course, therefore,
he could chant.

Once having begun, it followed naturally that the war should deepen
in bitterness. Wounds that wrote memorials in the flesh, insults that
rankled in the heart,--these were not features of the case likely to
be forgotten by our enemies, and far less by my fiery brother. I, for
my part, entered not into any of the passions that war may be supposed
to kindle, except only the chronic passion of anxiety. _Fear_ it was
not; for experience had taught me that, under the random firing of our
undisciplined enemies, the chances were not many of being wounded. But
the uncertainties of the war; the doubts in every separate action
whether I could keep up the requisite connection with my brother, and,
in case I could not, the utter darkness that surrounded my fate;
whether, as a trophy won from Israel, I should be dedicated to the
service of some Manchester Dagon, or pass through fire to Moloch,--all
these contingencies, for me that had no friend to consult, ran too
violently into the master current of my constitutional despondency
ever to give way under any casual elation of success. Success, however,
we really had at times; in slight skirmishes pretty often; and once,
at least, as the reader will find to his mortification, if he is wicked
enough to take the side of the Philistines, a most smashing victory
in a pitched battle. But even then, and whilst the hurrahs were yet
ascending from our jubilating lips, the freezing remembrance came back
to my heart of that deadly depression which, duly at the coming round
of the morning and evening watches, travelled with me like my shadow
on our approach to the memorable bridge. A bridge of sighs [9] too surely
it was for me; and even for my brother it formed an object of fierce yet
anxious jealousy, that he could not always disguise, as we first came in
sight of it; for, if it happened to be occupied in strength, there was an
end of all hope that we could attempt the passage; and _that_ was a
fortunate solution of the difficulty, as it imposed no evil beyond a
circuit; which, at least, was safe, if the world should choose to call it
inglorious. Even this shade of ignominy, however, my brother contrived
to color favorably, by calling us--that is, me and himself--"a corps
of observation;" and he condescendingly explained to me, that, although
making "a lateral movement," he had his eye upon the enemy, and "might
yet come round upon his left flank in a way that wouldn't, perhaps,
prove very agreeable." This, from the nature of the ground, never
happened. We crossed the river at Garrat, out of sight from the enemy's
position; and, on our return in the evening, when we reached that point
of our route from which the retreat was secure to Greenhay, we took
such revenge for the morning insult as might belong to extra liberality
in our stone donations. On this line of policy there was, therefore,
no cause for anxiety; but the common case was, that the numbers might
not be such as to justify this caution, and yet quite enough for
mischief. To my brother, however, stung and carried headlong into
hostility by the martial instincts of his nature, the uneasiness of
doubt or insecurity was swallowed up by his joy in the anticipation
of victory, or even of contest; whilst to myself, whose exultation was
purely official and ceremonial, as due by loyalty from a cadet to the
head of his house, no such compensation existed. The enemy was no enemy
in _my_ eyes; his affronts were but retaliations; and his insults
were so inapplicable to my unworthy self, being of a calibre exclusively
meant for the use of my brother, that from me they recoiled, one and
all, as cannon shot from cotton bags.

The ordinary course of our day's warfare was this: between nine and
ten in the morning occurred our first transit, and, consequently, our
earliest opportunity for doing business. But at this time the great
sublunary interest of breakfast, which swallowed up all nobler
considerations of glory and ambition, occupied the work people of the
factory, (or what in the pedantic diction of this day are termed the
"operatives,") so that very seldom any serious business was transacted.
Without any formal armistice, the paramount convenience of such an
arrangement silently secured its own recognition. Notice there needed
none of truce, when the one side yearned for breakfast, and the other
for a respite: the groups, therefore, on or about the bridge, if any
at all, were loose in their array, and careless. We passed through
them rapidly, and, on my part, uneasily; exchanging a few snarls,
perhaps, but seldom or ever snapping at each other. The tameness was
almost shocking of those who, in the afternoon, would inevitably resume
their natural characters of tiger cats and wolves. Sometimes, however,
my brother felt it to be a duty that we should fight in the morning;
particularly when any expression of public joy for a victory,--bells
ringing in the distance,--or when a royal birthday, or some traditional
commemoration of ancient feuds, (such as the 5th of November,) irritated
his martial propensities. Some of these being religious festivals,
seemed to require of us an _extra_ homage, for which we knew not how
to find any natural or significant expression, except through sharp
discharges of stones, that being a language older than Hebrew or
Sanscrit, and universally intelligible. But, excepting these high
days of religious solemnity, when a man is called upon to show that
he is not a pagan or a miscreant in the eldest of senses, by thumping,
or trying to thump, somebody who is accused or accusable of being
heterodox, the great ceremony of breakfast was allowed to sanctify the
hour. Some natural growls we uttered, but hushed them soon, regardless

          "Of the sweeping whirlpool's sway,
  That, hushed in grim repose, looked for his evening prey."

_That_ came but too surely. Yes, evening never forgot to come; this
odious necessity of fighting never missed its road back, or fell asleep,
or loitered by the way, more than a bill of exchange or a tertian
fever. Five times a week (Saturday sometimes, and Sunday always, were
days of rest) the same scene rehearsed itself in pretty nearly the
same succession of circumstances. Between four and five o'clock we had
crossed the bridge to the safe, or Greenhay side; then we paused, and
waited for the enemy. Sooner or later a bell rang, and from the smoky
hive issued the hornets that night and day stung incurably my peace
of mind. The order and procession of the incidents after this were
odiously monotonous. My brother occupied the main high road, precisely
at the point where a very gentle rise of the ground attained its summit;
for the bridge lay in a slight valley, and the main military position
was fifty or eighty yards above the bridge: then--but having first
examined my pockets, in order to be sure that my stock of ammunition,
stones, fragments of slate, with a reasonable proportion of brickbats,
was all correct and ready for action--he detached me about forty yards
to the right, my orders being invariable, and liable to no doubts or
"quibbling." Detestable in _my_ ears was that word "_quibbling_," by
which, for a thousand years, if the war had happened to last so long,
he would have fastened upon me the imputation of meaning, or wishing,
at least, to do what he called "pettifogulizing"--that is, to plead
some distinction, or verbal demur, in bar of my orders, under some
colorable pretence that, according to their literal construction, they
really did not admit of being fulfilled, or perhaps that they admitted
it too much as being capable of fulfilment in two senses, either of
them a practicable sense. True it was that my eye was preternaturally
keen for flaws of language, not from pedantic exaction of superfluous
accuracy, but, on the contrary, from too conscientious a wish to escape
the mistakes which language not rigorous is apt to occasion. So far
from seeking to "pettifogulize"--_i.e._, to find evasions for any
purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction--exactly
in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most
unwillingly I found, in almost every body's words, an unintentional
opening left for double interpretations. Undesigned equivocation
prevails every where; [10] and it is not the cavilling hair splitter,
but, on the contrary, the single-eyed servant of truth, that is most
likely to insist upon the limitation of expressions too wide or too
vague, and upon the decisive election between meanings potentially
double. Not in order to resist or evade my brother's directions, but for
the very opposite purpose--viz., that I might fulfil them to the letter;
thus and no otherwise it happened that I showed so much scrupulosity
about the exact value and position of his words, as finally to draw upon
myself the vexatious reproach of being habitually a "pettifogulizer."

Meantime, our campaigning continued to rage. Overtures of pacification
were never mentioned on either side. And I, for _my_ part, with the
passions only of peace at my heart, did the works of war faithfully
and with distinction. I presume so, at least, from the results. It is
true, I was continually falling into treason, without exactly knowing
how I got into it, or how I got out of it. My brother also, it is true,
sometimes assured me that he could, according to the rigor of martial
justice, have me hanged on the first tree we passed; to which my prosaic
answer had been, that of trees there _were_ none in Oxford
Street--[which, in imitation of Von Troil's famous chapter on the
snakes of Lapland, the reader may accept, if he pleases, as a complete
course of lectures on the "dendrology" of Oxford Street.] But,
notwithstanding such little stumblings in my career, I continued to
ascend in the service; and, I am sure, it will gratify my friendly
readers to hear, that, before my eighth birthday, I was promoted to
the rank of major general. Over this sunshine, however, soon swept a
train of clouds. Three times I was taken prisoner, and with different
results. The first time I was carried to the rear, and not molested
in any way. Finding myself thus ignominiously neglected, I watched my
opportunity; and, by making a wide circuit, easily effected my escape.
In the next case, a brief council was held over me; but I was not
allowed to hear the deliberations; the result only being communicated
to me--which result consisted in a message not very complimentary to
my brother, and a small present of kicks to myself. This present was
paid down without any discount, by means of a general subscription
amongst the party surrounding me--that party, luckily, not being very
numerous; besides which, I must, in honesty, acknowledge myself,
generally speaking, indebted to their forbearance. They were not
disposed to be too hard upon me. But, at the same time, they clearly
did not think it right that I should escape altogether from tasting
the calamities of war. And this translated the estimate of my guilt
from the public jurisdiction to that of the individual, sometimes
capricious and harsh, and carrying out the public award by means of
legs that ranged through all gradations of weight and agility. One
kick differed exceedingly from another kick in dynamic value; and, in
some cases, this difference was so distressingly conspicuous as to
imply special malice, unworthy, I conceive, of all generous soldiership.

On returning to our own frontiers, I had an opportunity of displaying
my exemplary greenness. That message to my brother, with all its
_virus_ of insolence I repeated as faithfully for the spirit as, and
as literally for the expressions, as my memory allowed me to do; and
in that troublesome effort, simpleton that I was, fancied myself
exhibiting a soldier's loyalty to his commanding officer. My brother
thought otherwise: he was more angry with me than with the enemy. I
ought, he said, to have refused all participation in such _sans
cullotes_ insolence; to carry it was to acknowledge it as fit to be
carried. One, grows wiser every day; and on this particular day I made
a resolution that, if again made prisoner, I would bring no more "jaw"
(so my brother called it) from the Philistines. If these people _would_
send "jaw," I settled that, henceforwards, it must go through the post
office.

In my former captures, there had been nothing special or worthy of
commemoration in the circumstances. Neither was there in the third,
excepting that, by accident, in the second stage of the case, I was
delivered over to the custody of young women and girls; whereas the
ordinary course would have thrown me upon the vigilant attentions
(relieved from monotony by the experimental kicks) of boys. So far,
the change was very much for the better. I had a feeling myself, on
first being presented to my new young mistresses, of a distressing
sort. Having always, up to the completion of my sixth year, been a
privileged pet, and almost, I might say, ranking amongst the sanctities
of the household, with all its female sections, whether young or old,
(an advantage which I owed originally to a long illness, an ague,
stretching over two entire years of my infancy,) naturally I had learned
to appreciate the indulgent tenderness of women; and my heart thrilled
with love and gratitude, as often as they took me up into their arms
and kissed me. Here it would have been as every where else; but,
unfortunately, my introduction to these young women was in the very
worst of characters. I had been taken in arms--in arms against their
own brothers, cousins, sweethearts, and on pretexts too frivolous to
mention. If asked the question, it would be found that I should not
myself deny the fact of being at war with their whole order. What was
the meaning of _that_? What was it to which war pledged a man? It
pledged him, in case of opportunity, to burn, ravage, and depopulate
the houses and lands of the enemy; which enemy was these fair girls.
The warrior stood committed to universal destruction. Neither sex nor
age, neither the smiles of unoffending infancy nor the gray hairs of
the venerable patriarch, neither the sanctity of the matron nor the
loveliness of the youthful bride, would confer any privilege with the
warrior, consequently not with me.

Many other hideous features in the military character will be found
in books innumerable--levelled at those who make war, and therefore
at myself. And it appears finally by these books, that, as one of my
ordinary practices, I make a wilderness, and call it a pacification;
that I hold it a duty to put people to the sword; which done, to plough
up the foundations of their hearths and altars, and then to sow the
ground with salt.

All this passing through my brain, when suddenly one young woman
snatched me up in her arms, and kissed me: from _her_, I was passed
round to others of the party, who all in turn caressed me, with no
allusion to that warlike mission against them and theirs, which only
had procured me the honor of an introduction to themselves in the
character of captive. The too palpable fact that I was not the person
meant by nature to exterminate their families, or to make wildernesses,
and call them pacifications, had withdrawn from their minds the
counterfact--that whatever had been my performances, my intentions had
been hostile, and that in such a character only I could have become
their prisoner. Not only did these young people kiss me, but I (seeing
no military reason against it) kissed _them_. Really, if young women
will insist on kissing major generals, they must expect that the
generals will retaliate. One only of the crowd adverted to the character
in which I came before them: to be a lawful prisoner, it struck her
too logical mind that I must have been caught in some aggressive
practices. "Think," she said, "of this little dog fighting, and fighting
our Jack." "But," said another in a propitiatory tone, "perhaps he'll
not do so any more." I was touched by the kindness of her suggestion,
and the sweet, merciful sound of that same "_Not do so any more_" which
really was prompted, I fear, much more by that charity in her which
hopeth all things than by any signs of amendment in myself. Well was
it for me that no time was allowed for an investigation into my morals
by point-blank questions as to my future intentions. In which case it
would have appeared too undeniably, that the same sad necessity which
had planted me hitherto in a position of hostility to their estimable
families would continue to persecute me; and that, on the very next
day, duty to my brother, howsoever it might struggle with gratitude
to themselves, would range me in martial attitude, with a pocketful
of stones, meant, alas! for the exclusive use of their respectable
kinsmen. Whilst I was preparing myself, however, for this painful
exposition, my female friends observed issuing from the factory a crowd
of boys not likely at all to improve my prospects. Instantly setting
me down on my feet, they formed a sort of _cordon sanitaire_ behind
me, by stretching out their petticoats or aprons, as in dancing, so
as to touch; and then crying out, "Now, little dog, run for thy life,"
prepared themselves (I doubt not) for rescuing me, should my recapture
be effected.

But this was not effected, although attempted with an energy that
alarmed me, and even perplexed me with a vague thought (far too
ambitious for my years) that one or two of the pursuing party might
be possessed by some demon of jealousy, as eye witnesses to my revelling
amongst the lips of that fair girlish bevy, kissing and being kissed,
loving and being loved; in which case, from all that ever I had read
about jealousy, (and I had read a great deal--viz., "Othello," and
Collins's "Ode to the Passions,") I was satisfied that, if again
captured, I had very little chance for my life. That jealousy was a
green-eyed monster, nobody could know better than _I_ did. "O, my lord,
beware of jealousy!" Yes; and my lord couldn't possibly have more
reason for bewaring of it than myself; indeed, well it would have been
had his lordship run away from all the ministers of jealousy--Iago,
Cassio, and embroidered handkerchiefs--at the same pace of six miles
an hour which kept me ahead of my infuriated pursuers. Ah, that maniac,
white as a leper with flakes of cotton, can I ever forget him--_him_
that ran so far in advance of his party? What passion but jealousy
could have sustained him in so hot a chase? There were some lovely
girls in the fair company that had so condescendingly caressed me;
but, doubtless, upon that sweet creature his love must have settled,
who suggested, in her soft, relenting voice, a penitence in me that,
alas! had not dawned, saying, "_Yes; but perhaps he will not do so any
more._" Thinking, as I ran, of her beauty, I felt that this jealous
demoniac must fancy himself justified in committing seven times seven
murders upon me, if he should have it in his power. But, thank Heaven,
if jealousy can run six miles an hour, there are other passions--as,
for instance, panic--that can run, upon occasion, six and a half; so,
as I had the start of him, (you know, reader,) and not a very short
start,--thanks be to the expanded petticoats of my dear female
friends!--naturally it happend that the green-eyed monster came in
second best. Time, luckily, was precious with _him_; and, accordingly,
when he had chased me into the by-road leading down to Greenhay, he
turned back. For the moment, therefore, I found myself suddenly released
from danger. But this counted for nothing. The same scene would probably
revolve upon me continually; and, on the next rehearsal, Green-eyes
might have better luck. It saddened me, besides, to find myself under
the political necessity of numbering amongst the Philistines, and as
daughters of Gath, so many kind-hearted girls, whom, by personal proof,
I knew to be such. In the profoundest sense, I was unhappy; and, not
from any momentary accident of distress, but from deep glimpses which
now, and heretofore, had opened themselves, as occassions arose, into
the inevitable conflicts of life. One of the saddest among such
conflicts is the necessity, wheresoever it occurs, of adopting--though
the heart should disown--the enmities of one's own family, or country,
or religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that necessity have
sometimes occurred during the Parliamentary war! And, in after years,
amongst our beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the same
impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir Ywain, as early as A.D.
1240--

  "But now, where'er I stray or go,
   My heart SHE has that is my foe!"

I knew--I anticipated to a certainty--that my brother would not hear
of any merit belonging to the factory population whom every day we had
to meet in battle; on the contrary, even submission on _their_ part,
and willingness to walk penitentially through the _Furcae Caudinae_,
would hardly have satisfied his sense of their criminality. Often,
indeed, as we came in view of the factory, he would shake his fist at
it, and say, in a ferocious tone of voice, "_Delenda est Carthago!_"
And certainly, I thought to myself, it must be admitted by every body,
that the factory people are inexcusable in raising a rebellion against
my brother. But still rebels were men, and sometimes were women; and
rebels, that stretch out their petticoats like fans for the sake of
screening one from the hot pursuit of enemies with fiery eyes, (green
or otherwise,) really are not the sort of people that one wishes to
hate.

Homewards, therefore, I drew in sadness, and little doubting that
_hereafter_ I might have verbal feuds with my brother on behalf of my
fair friends, but not dreaming how much displeasure I had already
incurred by my treasonable collusion with their caresses. That part
of the affair he had seen with his own eyes, from his position on the
field; and then it was that he left me indignantly to my fate, which,
by my first reception, it was easy to see would not prove very gloomy.
When I came into our own study, I found him engaged in preparing a
_bulletin_, (which word was just then travelling into universal use,)
reporting briefly the events of the day. The art of drawing, as I shall
again have occasion to mention, was amongst his foremost accomplishments;
and round the margin of the border ran a black border, ornamented with
cyprus and other funereal emblems. When finished, it was carried into the
room of Mrs. Evans. This Mrs. Evans was an important person in our
affairs. My mother, who never chose to have any direct communication with
her servants, always had a housekeeper for the regulation of all domestic
business; and the housekeeper, for some years, was this Mrs. Evans. Into
her private parlor, where she sat aloof from the under servants, my
brother and I had the _entrée_ at all times, but upon very different
terms of acceptance: he as a favorite of the first class; _I_, by
sufferance, as a sort of gloomy shadow that ran after _his_ person, and
could not well be shut out if _he_ were let in. Him she admired in the
very highest degree; myself, on the contrary, she detested, which made me
unhappy. But then, in some measure, she made amends for this, by
despising me in extremity; and for _that_ I was truly thankful--I need
not say _why_, as the reader already knows. Why she detested me, so far
as I know, arose in part out of my thoughtfulness indisposed to
garrulity, and in part out of my savage, Orson-like sincerity. I had a
great deal to say, but then I could say it only to a very few people,
amongst whom Mrs. Evans was certainly not one; and, when I _did_ say any
thing, I fear that dire ignorance prevented my laying the proper
restraints upon my too liberal candor; and _that could not prove
acceptable to one who thought nothing of working for any purpose, or for
no purpose, by petty tricks, or even falsehoods--all which I held in
stern abhorrence that I was at no pains to conceal. The _bulletin_ on
this occasion, garnished with this pageantry of woe, cypress wreaths, and
arms reversed, was read aloud to Mrs. Evans, indirectly, therefore, to
me. It communicated with Spartan brevity, the sad intelligence (but not
sad to Mrs. E.) "that the major general had forever disgraced himself, by
submitting to the ........ caresses of the enemy." I leave a blank for
the epithet affixed to "caresses," not because there _was_ any blank,
but, on the contrary, because my brother's wrath had boiled over in such
a hubble-bubble of epithets, some only half erased, some doubtfully
erased, that it was impossible, out of the various readings, to pick
out the true classical text. "Infamous," "disgusting," and "odious"
struggled for precedency; and _infamous_ they might be; but on the
other affixes I held my own private opinions. For some days my brother's
displeasure continued to roll in reverberating thunders; but at length
it growled itself to rest; and at last he descended to mild
expostulations with me, showing clearly, in a series of general orders,
what frightful consequences must ensue, if major generals (as a general
principle) should allow themselves to be kissed by the enemy.

About this time my brother began to issue, instead of occasional
bulletins, through which hitherto he had breathed his opinions into
the ear of the public, (viz., of Mrs. Evans,) a regular gazette, which,
in imitation of the London Gazette, was published twice a week. I
suppose that no creature ever led such a life as _I_ did in that
gazette. Run up to the giddiest heights of promotion on on day, for
merits which I could not myself discern, in a week or two I was brought
to a court martial for offenses equally obscure. I was cashiered; I
was restored "on the intercession of a distinguished lady;" (Mrs.
Evans, to wit;) I was threatened with being drummed out of the army,
to the music of the "Rogue's March;" and then, in the midst of all
this misery and degradation, upon the discovery of some supposed energy
that I had manifested, I was decorated with the Order of the Bath. My
reading had been extensive enough to give me some vague aerial sense
of the honor involved in such a decoration, whilst I was profoundly
ignorant of the channels through which it could reach an individual,
and of the sole fountain from which it could flow. But, in this enormity
of disproportion between the cause and the effect, between the agency
and the result, I saw nothing more astonishing than I had seen in many
other cases confessedly true. Thousands of vast effects, by all that
I had heard, linked themselves to causes apparently trivial. The
dreadful taint of scrofula, according to the belief of all Christendom,
fled at the simple touch of a Stuart [11] sovereign: no miracle in the
Bible, from Jordan or from Bethesda, could be more sudden or more
astoundingly victorious. By my own experience, again, I knew that a
_styan_ (as it is called) upon the eyelid could be easily reduced, though
not instantaneously, by the slight application of any golden trinket.
Warts upon the fingers of children I had myself known to vanish under the
_verbal_ charm of a gypsy woman, without any medicinal application
whatever. And I well knew, that almost all nations believed in the
dreadful mystery of the _evil eye_; some requiring, as a condition of the
evil agency, the co-presence of malice in the agent; but others, as
appeared from my father's Portuguese recollections, ascribing the same
horrid power to the eye of certain select persons, even though innocent
of all malignant purpose, and absolutely unconscious of their own fatal
gift, until awakened to it by the results. Why, therefore, should there
be any thing to shock, or even to surprise, in the power claimed by my
brother, as an attribute inalienable from primogeniture in certain select
families, of conferring knightly honors? The red ribbon of the Bath he
certainly _did_ confer upon me; and once, in a paroxysm of imprudent
liberality, he promised me at the end of certain months, supposing that I
swerved from my duty by no atrocious delinquency, the Garter itself.
This, I knew, was a far loftier distinction than the Bath. Even then it
was so; and since those days it has become much more so; because the long
roll of martial services in the great war with Napoleon compelled our
government greatly to widen the basis of the Bath. This promise was never
fulfilled; but not for any want of clamorous persecution on my part
addressed to my brother's wearied ear and somewhat callous sense of
honor. Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should receive a
"refresher," as lawyers call it,--a new and revised brief,--memorializing
my pretensions. These it was my brother's policy to parry, by alleged
instances of recent misconduct on my part. But all such offences, I
insisted, were thoroughly washed away by subsequent services in moments
of peril, such as he himself could not always deny. In reality, I
believe his real motive for withholding the Garter was, that he had
nothing better to bestow upon himself.

"Now, look here," he would say, appealing to Mrs. Evans; "I suppose
there's a matter of half a dozen kings on the continent, that would
consent to lose three of their fingers, if by such a sacrifice they
could purchase the blue ribbon; and here is this little scamp,
conceiting himself entitled to it before he has finished two campaigns.
"But I was not the person to be beaten off in this fashion. I took my
stand upon the promise. A promise _was_ a promise, even if made to a
scamp; and then, besides--but there I hesitated; awful thoughts
interposed to check me; else I wished to suggest that, perhaps, some
two or three among that half dozen kings might also be scamps. However,
I reduced the case to this plain dilemma: These six kings had received
a promise, or they had not. If they had not, my case was better than
theirs; if they _had_, then, said I, "all seven of us"--I was going
to add, "are sailing in the same boat," or something to that effect,
though not so picturesquely expressed; but I was interrupted by his
deadly frown at my audacity in thus linking myself on as a seventh to
this _attelage_ of kings, and that such an absolute grub should dream
of ranking as one in a bright pleiad of pretenders to the Garter. I
had not particularly thought of that; but now, that such a demur was
offered to my consideration, I thought of reminding him that, in a
certain shadowy sense, I also might presume to class myself as a king,
the meaning of which was this: Both my brother and myself, for the
sake of varying our intellectual amusements, occupied ourselves at
times in governing imaginary kingdoms. I do not mention this as any
thing unusual; it is a common resource of mental activity and of
aspiring energies amongst boys. Hartley Coleridge, for example, had
a kingdom which he governed for many years; whether well or ill, is
more than I can say. Kindly, I am sure, he would govern it; but, unless
a machine had been invented for enabling him to write without effort,
(as was really done for our fourth George during the pressure of
illness,) I fear that the public service must have languished deplorably
for want of the royal signature. In sailing past his own dominions,
what dolorous outcries would have saluted him from the shore--"Hollo,
royal sir! here's the deuse to pay: a perfect lock there is, as tight
as locked jaw, upon the course of our public business; throats there
are to be cut, from the product of ten jail deliveries, and nobody
dares to cut them, for want of the proper warrant; archbishoprics there
are to be filled; and, because they are _not_ filled, the whole nation
is running helter skelter into heresy--and all in consequence of your
majesty's sacred laziness." _Our_ governments were less remissly
administered; since each of us, by continued reports of improvements
and gracious concessions to the folly or the weakness of our subjects,
stimulated the zeal of his rival. And here, at least, there seemed to
be no reason why I should come into collision with my brother. At any
rate, I took pains _not_ to do so. But all was in vain. My destiny
was, to live in one eternal element of feud.

My own kingdom was an island called Gombroon. But in what parallel of
north or south latitude it lay, I concealed for a time as rigorously
as ancient Rome through every century concealed her real name.
[12] The object in this provisional concealment was, to regulate
the position of my own territory by that of my brother's; for I was
determined to place a monstrous world of waters between us as the only
chance (and a very poor one it proved) for compelling my brother to
keep the peace. At length, for some reason unknown to me, and much to
my astonishment, he located his capital city in the high latitude of
65 deg. N. That fact being once published and settled, instantly I
smacked my little kingdom of Gombroon down into the tropics, 10 deg.,
I think, south of the line. Now, at least, I was on the right side of
the hedge, or so I flattered myself; for it struck me that my brother
never would degrade himself by fitting out a costly nautical expedition
against poor little Gombroon; and how else could he get at me? Surely
the very fiend himself, if he happened to be in a high arctic latitude,
would not indulge his malice so far as to follow its trail into the
tropic of Capricorn. And what was to be got by such a freak? There was
no Golden Fleece in Gombroon. If the fiend or my brother fancied _that_,
for once they were in the wrong box; and there was no variety of
vegetable produce, for I never denied that the poor little island was
only 270 miles in circuit. Think, then, of sailing through 75 deg. of
latitude only to crack such a miserable little filbert as that. But
my brother stunned me by explaining, that, although his capital lay
in lat. 65 deg. N., not the less his dominions swept southwards through
a matter of 80 or 90 deg.; and as to the tropic of Capricorn, much of
it was his own private property. I was aghast at hearing _that_. It
seemed that vast horns and promontories ran down from all parts of his
dominions towards any country whatsoever, in either hemisphere,--empire
or republic, monarchy, polyarchy, or anarchy,--that he might have
reasons for assaulting.

Here in one moment vanished all that I had relied on for protection:
distance I had relied on, and suddenly I was found in close neighborhood
to my most formidable enemy. Poverty I had rolled on, and _that_ was
not denied: he granted the poverty, but it was dependent on the
barbarism of the Gombroonians. It seems that in the central forests
of Gombroonia there were diamond mines, which my people, from their
low condition of civilization, did not value, nor had any means of
working. Farewell, therefore, on _my_ side, to all hopes of enduring
peace, for here was established, in legal phrase, _a lien_ forever
upon my island, and not upon its margin, but its very centre, in favor
of any invaders better able than the natives to make its treasures
available. For, of old, it was an article in my brother's code of
morals, that, supposing a contest between any two parties, of which
one possessed an article, whilst the other was better able to use it,
the rightful property vested in the latter. As if you met a man with
a musket, then you might justly challenge him to a trial in the art
of making gunpowder; which if you _could_ make, and he could _not_,
in that case the musket was _de jure_ yours. For what shadow of a right
had the fellow to a noble instrument which he could not "maintain" in
a serviceable condition, and "feed" with its daily rations of powder
and shot? Still, it may be fancied that, since all the relations between
us as independent sovereigns (whether of war, or peace, or treaty)
rested upon our own representations and official reports, it was surely
within my competence to deny or qualify as much as within his to assert.
But, in reality, the _law_ of the contest between us, as suggested by
some instinct of propriety in my own mind, would not allow me to proceed
in such a method. What he said was like a move at chess or draughts,
which it was childish to dispute. The move being made, my business
was--to face it, to parry it, to evade it, and, if I could, to overthrow
it. I proceeded as a lawyer who moves as long as he can, not by blank
denial of facts, (or _coming to an issue_,) but by _demurring_, (_i.e._,
admitting the allegations of fact, but otherwise interpreting their
construction.) It was the understood necessity of the case that I must
passively accept my brother's statements so far as regarded their verbal
expression; and, if _I_ would extricate my poor islanders from their
troubles, it must be by some distinction or evasion lying _within_ this
expression, or not blankly contradicting it.

"How, and to what extent," my brother asked, "did I raise taxes upon
my subjects?" My first impulse was to say, that I did not tax them at
all, for I had a perfect horror of doing so; but prudence would not
allow of my saying _that_; because it was too probable he would demand
to know how, in that case, I maintained a standing army; and if I once
allowed it to be supposed that I had none, there was an end forever
to the independence of my people. Poor things! they would have been
invaded and dragooned in a month. I took some days, therefore, to
consider that point; but at last replied, that my people, being
maritime, supported themselves mainly by a herring fishery, from which
I deducted a part of the produce, and afterwards sold it for manure
to neighboring nations. This last hint I borrowed from the conversation
of a stranger who happened to dine one day at Greenhay, and mentioned
that in Devonshire, or at least on the western coast of that county,
near Ilfracombe, upon any excessive take of herrings, beyond what the
markets could absorb, the surplus was applied to the land as a valuable
dressing. It might be inferred from this account, however, that the
arts must be in a languishing state amongst a people that did not
understand the process of salting fish; and my brother observed
derisively, much to my grief, that a wretched ichthyophagous people
must make shocking soldiers, weak as water, and liable to be knocked
over like ninepins; whereas, in _his_ army, not a man ever ate
herrings, pilchards, mackerels, or, in fact, condescended to any thing
worse than surloins of beef.

At every step I had to contend for the honor and independence of my
islanders; so that early I came to understand the weight of Shakspeare's
sentiment--

  "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!"

O reader, do not laugh! I lived forever under the terror of two separate
wars in two separate worlds: one against the factory boys, in a real
world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and
pursuit, that were any thing but figurative; the other in a world
purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute
moonshine. And yet the simple truth is, that, for anxiety and distress
of mind, the reality (which almost every morning's light brought round)
was as nothing in comparison of that dream kingdom which rose like a
vapor from my own brain, and which apparently by _fiat_ of my will
could be forever dissolved. Ah! but no; I had contracted obligations
to Gombroon; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret
truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a
shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with
the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs,
these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually
frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material
realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings?
asks the laborer in "Hamlet;" and the answer is, The gravedigger. He
builds for corruption; and yet _his_ tenements are incorruptible: "the
houses which _he_ makes last to doomsday." [13] Who is it that seeks for
concealment? Let him hide himself [14] in the unsearchable chambers of
light,--of light which at noonday, more effectually than any gloom,
conceals the very brightest stars,--rather than in labyrinths of darkness
the thickest. What criminal is that who wishes to abscond from public
justice? Let him hurry into the frantic publicities of London, and by no
means into the quiet privacies of the country. So, and upon the analogy
of these cases, we may understand that, to make a strife overwhelming by
a thousand fold to the feelings, it must not deal with gross material
interests, but with such as rise into the world of dreams, and act
upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through fleshly torments.
Mine, in the present case, rose suddenly, like a rocket, into their
meridian altitude, by means of a hint furnished to my brother from a
Scotch advocate's reveries.

This advocate, who by his writings became the remote cause of so much
affliction to my childhood, and struck a blow at the dignity of
Gombroon, that neither my brother nor all the forces of Tigrosylvania
(my brother's kingdom) ever could have devised, was the celebrated
James Burnett, better known to the English public by his judicial title
of Lord Monboddo. The Burnetts of Monboddo, I have often heard, were
a race distinguished for their intellectual accomplishments through
several successive generations; and the judge in question was eminently
so. It did him no injury that many people regarded him as crazy. In
England, at the beginning of the last century, we had a saying,
[15] in reference to the Harveys of Lord Bristol's family, equally
distinguished for wit, beauty, and eccentricity, that at the creation
there had been three kinds of people made, viz., men, women, and Harveys;
and by all accounts, something of the same kind might plausibly have been
said in Scotland about the Burnetts. Lord Monboddo's nieces, of whom one
perished by falling from a precipice, (and, as I have heard, through mere
absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which she carried in her
hand,) still survive in the affection of many friends, through the
interest attached to their intellectual gifts; and Miss Burnett, the
daughter of the judge, is remembered in all the memorials of Burns the
poet, as the most  beautiful, and otherwise the most interesting, of his
female aristocratic friends in Edinburgh. Lord Monboddo himself trod an
eccentric path in literature and philosophy; and our tutor, who spent
his whole life in reading, withdrawing himself in that way from the
anxieties incident to a narrow income and a large family, found, no
doubt, a vast fund of interesting suggestions in Lord M.'s "Dissertations
on the Origin of Language;" but to us he communicated only one section of
the work. It was a long passage, containing some very useful
illustrations of a Greek idiom; useful I call them, because four years
afterwards, when I had made great advances in my knowledge of Greek, they
so appeared to me. [16] But then, being scarcely seven years
old, as soon as our tutor had finished his long extract from the
Scottish judge's prelection, I could express my thankfulness for what
I had received only by composing my features to a deeper solemnity and
sadness than usual--no very easy task, I have been told; otherwise,
I really had not the remotest conception of what his lordship meant.
I knew very well the thing called a _tense_; I knew even then by name
the _Aoristus Primus_, as a respectable tense in the Greek language.
It (or shall we say _he_?) was known to the whole Christian world by
this distinction of _Primus_; clearly, therefore, there must be some
low, vulgar tense in the background, pretending also to the name of
Aorist, but universally scouted as the _Aoristus Secundus_, or
Birmingham counterfeit. So that, unable as I was, from ignorance, to
go along with Lord M.'s appreciation of his pretensions, still, had
it been possible to meet an Aoristus Primus in the flesh, I should
have bowed to him submissively, as to one apparently endowed with the
mysterious rights of primogeniture. Not so my brother.

Aorist, indeed! Primus or Secundus, what mattered it? Paving stones
were something, brickbats were something; but an old superannuated
tense! That any grown man should trouble himself about _that!_ Indeed
there _was_ something extraordinary there. For it is not amongst the
ordinary functions of lawyers to take charge of Greek; far less, one
might suppose, of lawyers of Scotland, where the _general_ system of
education has moved for two centuries upon a principle of slight regard
to classical literature. Latin literature was very much neglected, and
Greek nearly altogether. The more was the astonishment at finding a
rare delicacy of critical instinct, as well as of critical sagacity,
applied to the Greek idiomatic niceties by a Scottish lawyer, viz.,
that the same eccentric judge, first made known to us by our tutor.

To the majority of readers, meantime, at this day, Lord M. is memorable
chiefly for his craze about the degeneracy of us poor moderns, when
compared with the men of pagan antiquity; which craze itself might
possibly not have been generally known, except in connection with the
little skirmish between him and Dr. Johnson, noticed in Boswell's
account of the doctor's Scottish tour. "Ah, doctor," said Lord M.,
upon some casual suggestion of that topic, "poor creatures are we of
this eighteenth century; our fathers were better men than we!" "O, no,
my lord," was Johnson's reply; "we are quite as strong as our
forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too
widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception
[17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded
itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have
challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning
attached usually to the word _paradox_) have often no falsehood in them,
so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing
paradoxical. It contradicted all the indications of history and
experience, which uniformly had pointed in the very opposite direction;
and so far it ought to have been paradoxical, (that is, revolting to
popular opinion,) but was _not_ so; for it fell in with prevailing
opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human
superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not _seem_
extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never
have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and
atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in
that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of
mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most
morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you
please, of fantastic) but still of most real distress.

How much it would have astonished Lord Monboddo to find himself made
answerable, virtually made answerable, by the evidence of secret tears,
for the misery of an unknown child in Lancashire. Yet night and day
these silent memorials of suffering were accusing him as the founder
of a wound that could not be healed. It happened that the several
volumes of his work lay for weeks in the study of our tutor. Chance
directed the eye of my brother, one day, upon that part of the work
in which Lord M. unfolds his hypothesis that originally the human race
had been a variety of the ape. On which hypothesis, by the way, Dr.
Adam Clarke's substitution of _ape_ for _serpent_, in translating the
word _nachash_, (the brute tempter of Eve,) would have fallen to the
ground, since this would simply have been the case of one human being
tempting another. It followed inevitably, according to Lord M., however
painful it might be to human dignity, that in this, their early stage
of brutality, men must have had tails. My brother mused upon this
revery, and, in a few days, published an extract from some scoundrel's
travels in Gombroon, according to which the Gombroonians had not yet
emerged from this early condition of apedom. They, it seems, were still
_homines caudati_. Overwhelming to me and stunning was the ignominy
of this horrible discovery. Lord M. had not overlooked the natural
question--In what way did men get rid of their tails? To speak the
truth, they never _would_ have got rid of them had they continued to
run wild; but growing civilization introduced arts, and the arts
introduced sedentary habits. By these it was, by the mere necessity
of continually sitting down, that men gradually wore off their tails.
Well, and what should hinder the Gombroonians from sitting down?
_Their_ tailors and shoemakers would and could, I hope, sit down, as
well as those of Tigrosylvania. Why not? Ay, but my brother had insisted
already that they _had_ no tailors, that they _had_ no shoemakers;
which, _then_, I did not care much about, as it merely put back the
clock of our history--throwing us into an earlier, and therefore,
perhaps, into a more warlike stage of society. But, as the case stood
now, this want of tailors, &c., showed clearly that the process of
sitting down, so essential to the ennobling of the race, had not
commenced. My brother, with an air of consolation, suggested that I
might even now, without an hour's delay, compel the whole nation to
sit down for six hours a day, which would always "make a beginning."
But the truth would remain as before, viz., that I was the king of a
people that had tails; and the slow, slow process by which, in a course
of many centuries, their posterity might rub them off,--a hope of
vintages never to be enjoyed by any generations that are yet heaving
in sight,--_that_ was to me the worst form of despair.

Still there was one resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state
of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew _that_. I might
abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the
poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the
degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us,
what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, _that_ was
fine talking; but this connection with my poor subjects had grown up
so slowly and so genially, in the midst of struggles so constant against
the encroachments of my brother and his rascally people; we had suffered
so much together; and the filaments connecting them with my heart were
so aerially fine and fantastic, but for that reason so inseverable,
that I abated nothing of my anxiety on their account; making this
difference only in my legislation and administrative cares, that I
pursued them more in a spirit of despondency, and retreated more shyly
from communicating them. It was in vain that my brother counselled me
to dress my people in the Roman toga, as the best means of concealing
their ignominious appendages: if he meant this as comfort, it was none
to me; the disgrace lay in the fact, not in its publication; and in
my heart, though I continued to honor Lord Monboddo (whom I heard my
guardian also daily delighting to honor) as a good Grecian, yet secretly
I cursed the Aoristus Primus, as the indirect occasion of a misery
which was not and could not be comprehended.

From this deep degradation of myself and my people, I was drawn off
at intervals to contemplate a different mode of degradation affecting
two persons, twin sisters, whom I saw intermittingly; sometimes once
a week, sometimes frequently on each separate day. You have heard,
reader, of pariahs. The pathos of that great idea possibly never reached
you. Did it ever strike you how far that idea had extended? Do not
fancy it peculiar to Hindostan. Before Delhi was, before Agra, or
Lahore, might the pariah say, I was. The most interesting, if only as
the most mysterious, race of ancient days, the Pelasgi, that overspread,
in early times of Greece, the total Mediterranean,--a race distinguished
for beauty and for intellect, and sorrowful beyond all power of man
to read the cause that could lie deep enough for so imperishable an
impression,--_they_ were pariahs. The Jews that, in the twenty-eighth
chapter of Deuteronomy, were cursed in a certain contingency with a
sublimer curse than ever rang through the passionate wrath of prophecy,
and that afterwards, in Jerusalem, cursed themselves, voluntarily
taking on their own heads, and on the heads of their children's children
forever and ever, the guilt of innocent blood,--_they_ are pariahs
to this hour. Yet for _them_ there has ever shone a sullen light of
hope. The gypsies, for whom no conscious or acknowledged hope burns
through the mighty darkness that surrounds them,--they are pariahs of
pariahs. Lepers were a race of mediaeval pariahs, rejected of men, that
now have gone to rest. But travel into the forests of the Pyrenees,
and there you will find their modern representatives in the Cagots.
Are these Pyrenean Cagots pagans? Not at all, They are good Christians.
Wherefore, then, that low door in the Pyrenean churches, through which
the Cagots are forced to enter, and which, obliging them to stoop
almost to the ground, is a perpetual memento of their degradation?
Wherefore is it that men of pure Spanish blood will hold no intercourse
with the Cagot? Wherefore is it that even the shadow of a Cagot, if
it falls across a fountain, is held to have polluted that fountain?
All this points to some dreadful taint of guilt, real or imputed, in
ages far remote. [18]

But in ages far nearer to ourselves, nay, in our own generation and
our own land, are many pariahs, sitting amongst us all, nay, oftentimes
sitting (yet not recognized for what they really are) at good men's
tables. How general is that sensuous dulness, that deafness of the
heart, which the Scriptures attribute to human beings! "Having ears,
they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand." In the very act
of facing or touching a dreadful object, they will utterly deny its
existence. Men say to me daily, when I ask them, in passing, "Any thing
in this morning's paper?" "O, no; nothing at all." And, as I never had
any other answer, I am bound to suppose that there never _was_ any
thing in a daily newspaper; and, therefore, that the horrible burden
of misery and of change, which a century accumulates as its _facit_
or total result, has not been distributed at all amongst its thirty-six
thousand five hundred and twenty-five days: every day, it seems, was
separately a blank day, yielding absolutely nothing--what children
call a deaf nut, offering no kernel; and yet the total product has
caused angels to weep and tremble. Meantime, when I come to look at
the newspaper with my own eyes, I am astonished at the misreport of
my informants. Were there no other section in it than simply that
allotted to the police reports, oftentimes I stand aghast at the
revelations there made of human life and the human heart; at its
colossal guilt, and its colossal misery; at the suffering which
oftentimes throws its shadow over palaces, and the grandeur of mute
endurance which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the
dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains
of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us.
Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people
see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read
the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with
the babbling garrulity of daylight. I suppose now, that, in the next
generation after that which is here concerned, had any neighbor of our
tutor been questioned on the subject of a domestic tragedy, which
travelled through its natural stages in a leisurely way, and under the
eyes of good Dr. S----, he would have replied, "Tragedy! O, sir, nothing
of the kind! You have been misled; the gentleman must lie under a
mistake: perhaps it was in the next street." No, it was _not_ in the
next street; and the gentleman does not lie under a mistake, or, in
fact, lie at all. The simple truth is, blind old neighbor, that you,
being rarely in the house, and, _when_ there, only in one particular
room, saw no more of what was hourly going on than if you had been
residing with the Sultan of Bokhara. But I, a child between seven and
eight years old, had access every where. I was privileged, and had the
_entree_ even of the female apartments; one consequence of which was,
that I put _this_ and _that_ together. A number of syllables, that
each for itself separately might have meant nothing at all, did yet,
when put together, through weeks and months, read for _my_ eyes into
sentences, as deadly and significant as _Tekel, upharsin._ And another
consequence was, that, being, on account of my age, nobody at all, or
very near it, I sometimes witnessed things that perhaps it had not
been meant for any body to witness, or perhaps some half-conscious
negligence overlooked my presence. "Saw things! What was it now? Was
it a man at midnight, with a dark lantern and a six-barrel revolver?"
No, _that_ was not in the least like what I saw: it was a great deal
more like what I will endeavor to describe. Imagine two young girls,
of what exact age I really do not know, but apparently from twelve to
fourteen, twins, remarkably plain in person and features, unhealthy,
and obscurely reputed to be idiots. Whether they really were such was
more than I knew, or could devise any plan for learning. Without
dreaming of any thing unkind or uncourteous, my original impulse had
been to say, "If you please, are you idiots?" But I felt that such a
question had an air of coarseness about it, though, for my own part,
I had long reconciled myself to being called an idiot by my brother.
There was, however, a further difficulty: breathed as a gentle murmuring
whisper, the question might possibly be reconciled to an indulgent ear
as confidential and tender. Even to take a liberty with those you love
is to show your trust in their affection; but, alas! these poor girls
were deaf; and to have shouted out, "Are you idiots, if you please?"
in a voice that would have rung down three flights of stairs, promised
(as I felt, without exactly seeing why) a dreadful exaggeration to
whatever incivility might, at any rate, attach to the question; and
some _did_ attach, that was clear, even if warbled through an air of
Cherubini's and accompanied on the flute. Perhaps they were _not_
idiots, and only seemed to be such from the slowness of apprehension
naturally connected with deafness. That I saw them but seldom, arose
from their peculiar position in the family. Their father had no private
fortune; his income from the church was very slender; and, though
considerably increased by the allowance made for us, his two pupils,
still, in a great town, and with so large a family, it left him little
room for luxuries. Consequently, he never had more than two servants,
and at times only one. Upon this plea rose the scheme of the mother
for employing these two young girls in menial offices of the household
economy. One reason for that was, that she thus indulged her dislike
for them, which she took no pains to conceal; and thus, also, she
withdrew them from the notice of strangers. In this way, it happened
that I saw them myself but at uncertain intervals. Gradually, however,
I came to be aware of their forlorn condition, to pity them, and to
love them. The poor twins were undoubtedly plain to the degree which
is called, by unfeeling people, ugliness. They were also deaf, as I
have said, and they were scrofulous; one of them was disfigured by the
small pox; they had glimmering eyes, red, like the eyes of ferrets,
and scarcely half open; and they did not walk so much as stumble along.
There, you have the worst of them. Now, hear something on the other
side. What first won my pity was, their affection for each other,
united to their constant sadness; secondly, a notion which had crept
into my head, probably derived from something said in my presence by
elder people, that they were destined to an early death; and, lastly,
the incessant persecutions of their mother. This lady belonged, by
birth, to a more elevated rank than that of her husband, and she was
remarkably well bred as regarded her manners. But she had probably a
weak understanding; she was shrewish in her temper; was a severe
economist; a merciless exactor of what she viewed as duty; and, in
persecuting her two unhappy daughters, though she yielded blindly to
her unconscious dislike of them, as creatures that disgraced her, she
was not aware, perhaps, of ever having put forth more expressions of
anger and severity than were absolutely required to rouse the
constitutional torpor of her daughters' nature; and where disgust has
once rooted itself, and been habitually expressed in tones of harshness,
the mere sight of the hateful object mechanically calls forth the
eternal tones of anger, without distinct consciousness or separate
intention in the speaker. Loud speaking, besides, or even shouting,
was required by the deafness of the two girls. From anger so constantly
discharging its thunders, naturally they did not show open signs of
recoiling; but that they felt it deeply, may be presumed from their
sensibility to kindness. My own experience showed _that_; for, as
often as I met them, we exchanged kisses; and my wish had always been
to beg them, if they really _were_ idiots, not to mind it, since I
should not like them the less on that account. This wish of mine never
came to utterance; but not the less they were aware, by my manner of
salutation, that one person at least, amongst those who might be
considered strangers, did not find any thing repulsive about them; and
the pleasure they felt was expressed broadly upon their kindling faces.

Such was the outline of their position; and, that being explained,
what I saw was simply this: it composed a silent and symbolic scene,
a momentary interlude in dumb show, which interpreted itself, and
settled forever in my recollection, as if it had prophesied and
interpreted the event which soon followed. They were resting from toil,
and both sitting down. This had lasted for perhaps ten or fifteen
minutes. Suddenly from below stairs the voice of angry summons rang
up to their ears. Both rose, in an instant, as if the echoing scourge
of some avenging Tisiphone were uplifted above their heads; both opened
their arms; flung them round each other's necks; and then, unclasping
them, parted to their separate labors. This was my last rememberable
interview with the two sisters; in a week both were corpses. They had
died, I believe, of scarlatina, and very nearly at the same moment.

       *       *       *       *       *

But surely it was no matter for grief, that the two scrofulous idiots
were dead and buried. O, no! Call them idiots at your pleasure, serfs
or slaves, strulbrugs [19] or pariahs; _their_ case was certainly not
worsened by being booked for places in the grave. Idiocy, for any thing I
know, may, in that vast kingdom, enjoy a natural precedency; scrofula and
leprosy may have some mystic privilege in a coffin; and the pariahs
of the upper earth may form the aristocracy of the dead. That the
idiots, real or reputed, were at rest,--that their warfare was
accomplished,--might, if a man happened to know enough, be interpreted
as a glorious festival. The sisters were seen no more upon staircases
or in bed rooms, and deadly silence had succeeded to the sound of
continual uproars. Memorials of _them_ were none surviving on earth.
Not _they_ it was that furnished mementoes of themselves. The mother
it was, the father it was--that mother who by persecution had avenged
the wounds offered to her pride; that father, who had tolerated this
persecution; she it was, he it was, that by the altered glances of her
haunted eye, that by the altered character of his else stationary
habits, had revived for me a spectacle, once real, of visionary twin
sisters, moving forever up and down the stairs--sisters, patient,
humble, silent, that snatched convulsively at a loving smile, or loving
gesture, from a child, as at some message of remembrance from God,
whispering to them, "You are not forgotten"--sisters born apparently
for the single purpose of suffering, whose trials, it is true, were
over, and could not be repeated, but (alas for her who had been their
cause!) could not be recalled. Her face grew thin, her eye sunken and
hollow, after the death of her daughters; and, meeting her on the
staircase, I sometimes fancied that she did not see me so much as
something beyond me. Did any misfortune befall her after this double
funeral? Did the Nemesis that waits upon the sighs of children pursue
her steps? Not apparently: externally, things went well; her sons were
reasonably prosperous; her handsome daughter--for she had a more
youthful daughter, who really _was_ handsome--continued to improve in
personal attractions; and some years after, I have heard, she married
happily. But from herself, so long as I continued to know her, the
altered character of countenance did not depart, nor the gloomy eye,
that seemed to converse with secret and visionary objects.

This result from the irrevocable past was not altogether confined to
herself. It is one evil attached to chronic and domestic oppression,
that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing,
coöperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are
abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head
against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the
coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless irritation
of his manner for some time after the children's death, their father
testified, in a language not fully, perhaps, perceived by himself, or
meant to be understood by others, that to his inner conscience he also
was not clear of blame. Had he, then, in any degree sanctioned the
injustice which sometimes he must have witnessed? Far from it; he had
been roused from his habitual indolence into energetic expressions of
anger; he had put an end to the wrong, when it came openly before him.
I had myself heard him say on many occasions, with patriarchal fervor,
"Woman, they are your children, and God made them. Show mercy to _them_,
as you expect it for yourself." But he must have been aware, that, for
any three instances of tyrannical usage that fell under his notice,
at least five hundred would escape it. That was the sting of the
case--that was its poisonous aggravation. But with a nature that sought
for peace before all things, in this very worst of its aggravations
was found a morbid cure--the effectual temptation to wilful blindness
and forgetfulness. The sting became the palliation of the wrong, and
the poison became its anodyne. For together with the five hundred
hidden wrongs, arose the necessity that they must be hidden. Could he
be pinned on, morning, noon, and night, to his wife's apron? And if
not, what else should he do by angry interferences at chance times
than add special vindictive impulses to those of general irritation
and dislike? Some truth there was in this, it cannot be denied:
innumerable cases arise, in which a man the most just is obliged, in
some imperfect sense, to connive at injustice; his chance experience
must convince him that injustice is continually going on; and yet, in
any attempt to intercept it or to check it, he is met and baffled by
the insuperable obstacles of household necessities. Dr. S. therefore
surrendered himself, as under a coercion that was none of _his_
creating, to a passive acquiescence and a blindness that soothed his
constitutional indolence; and he reconciled his feelings to a tyranny
which he tolerated, under some self-flattering idea of submitting with
resignation to a calamity that he suffered.

Some years after this, I read "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus; and then, in
the prophetic horror with which Cassandra surveys the regal abode in
Mycenae, destined to be the scene of murders so memorable through the
long traditions of the Grecian stage, murders that, many centuries
after all the parties to them--perpetrators, sufferers, avengers--had
become dust and ashes, kindled again into mighty life through a thousand
years upon the vast theaters of Athens and Rome, I retraced the horrors,
not prophetic but memorial, with which I myself had invested that
humble dwelling of Dr. S.; and read again, repeated in visionary
proportions, the sufferings which there had darkened the days of people
known to myself through two distinct successions--not, as was natural
to expect, of parents first and then children, but inversely of children
and parents. Manchester was not Mycenae. No, but by many degrees nobler.
In some of the features most favorable to tragic effects, it was so;
and wanted only these idealizing advantages for withdrawing mean details
which are in the gift of distance and hazy antiquity. Even at that day
Manchester was far larger, teeming with more and with stronger hearts;
and it contained a population the most energetic even in the _modern_
world--how much more so, therefore, by comparison with any race in
_ancient_ Greece, inevitably rendered effeminate by dependence too
generally upon slaves. Add to this superior energy in Lanceshire, the
immeasurably profounder feelings generated by the mysteries which stand
behind Christianity, as compared with the shallow mysteries that stood
behind paganism, and it would be easy to draw the inference, that,
in the capacity for the infinite and impassioned, for horror and for
pathos, Mycenae could have had no pretentions to measure herself against
Manchester. Not that I had drawn such an inference myself. Why should
I? there being nothing to suggest the points in which the two cities
differed, but only the single one in which they agreed, viz., the dusky
veil that overshadowed in both the noonday tragedies haunting their
household recesses; which veil was raised only to the gifted eyes of
a Cassandra, or to the eyes that, like my own, had experimentally
become acquainted with them as facts. Pitiably mean is he that measures
the relations of such cases by the scenical apparatus of purple and
gold. That which never _has_ been apparelled in royal robes, and hung
with theatrical jewels, is but suffering from an accidental fraud,
having the same right to them that any similar misery can have, or
calamity upon an equal scale. These proportions are best measured from
the fathoming ground of a real uncounterfeit sympathy.

I have mentioned already that we had four male guardians, (a fifth
being my mother.) These four were B., E., G., and H. The two consonants,
B. and G., gave us little trouble. G., the wisest of the whole band,
lived at a distance of more than one hundred miles: him, therefore,
we rarely saw; but B., living within four miles of Greenbay, washed
his hands of us by inviting us, every now and then, to spend a few
days at his house.

At this house, which stood in the country, there was a family of amiable
children, who were more skilfully trained in their musical studies
than at that day was usual. They sang the old English glees and
madrigals, and correctly enough for me, who, having, even at that
childish age, a preternatural sensibility to music, had also, as may
be supposed, the most entire want of musical knowledge. No blunders
could do much to mar _my_ pleasure. There first I heard the concertos
of Corelli; but also, which far more profoundly affected me, a few
selections from Jomelli and Cimarosa. With Handel I had long been
familiar, for the famous chorus singers of Lancashire sang continually
at churches the most effective parts from his chief oratorios. Mozart
was yet to come; for, except perhaps at the opera in London, even at
this time, his music was most imperfectly diffused through England.
But, above all, a thing which to my dying day I could never forget,
at the house of this guardian I heard sung a long canon of Cherubini's.
Forty years later I heard it again, and better sung; but at that time
I needed nothing better. It was sung by four male voices, and rose
into a region of thrilling passion, such as my heart had always dimly
craved and hungered after, but which now first interpreted itself, as
a physical possibility, to my ear.

My brother did no

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