The Pilgrims of the Rhine
by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton · English · Gutenberg #8206 · 513,509 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Pilgrims of the Rhine
Author: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #8206]
Most recently updated: August 28, 2016
Language: English
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Credits: Produced by David Widger and Dagny
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE ***
Produced by David Widger and Dagny
THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE
TO WHICH IS PREFIXED THE IDEAL WORLD
By Edward Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton)
THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE
TO HENRY LYTTON BULWER.
ALLOW me, my dear Brother, to dedicate this Work to you. The greater
part of it (namely, the tales which vary and relieve the voyages of
Gertrude and Trevylyan) was written in the pleasant excursion we made
together some years ago. Among the associations--some sad and some
pleasing--connected with the general design, none are so agreeable to
me as those that remind me of the friendship subsisting between us, and
which, unlike that of near relations in general, has grown stronger
and more intimate as our footsteps have receded farther from the fields
where we played together in our childhood. I dedicate this Work to you
with the more pleasure, not only when I remember that it has always
been a favourite with yourself, but when I think that it is one of my
writings most liked in foreign countries; and I may possibly, therefore,
have found a record destined to endure the affectionate esteem which
this Dedication is intended to convey.
Yours, etc.
E. L. B. LONDON, April 23, 1840.
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION.
COULD I prescribe to the critic and to the public, I would wish that
this work might be tried by the rules rather of poetry than prose,
for according to those rules have been both its conception and its
execution; and I feel that something of sympathy with the author’s
design is requisite to win indulgence for the superstitions he has
incorporated with his tale, for the floridity of his style, and the
redundance of his descriptions. Perhaps, indeed, it would be impossible,
in attempting to paint the scenery and embody some of the Legends of
the Rhine, not to give (it may be, too loosely) the reins to the
imagination, or to escape the influence of that wild German spirit which
I have sought to transfer to a colder tongue.
I have made the experiment of selecting for the main interest of my
work the simplest materials, and weaving upon them the ornaments given
chiefly to subjects of a more fanciful nature. I know not how far I have
succeeded, but various reasons have conspired to make this the work,
above all others that I have written, which has given me the most
delight (though not unmixed with melancholy) in producing, and in which
my mind for the time has been the most completely absorbed. But the
ardour of composition is often disproportioned to the merit of the
work; and the public sometimes, nor unjustly, avenges itself for
that forgetfulness of its existence which makes the chief charm of an
author’s solitude,--and the happiest, if not the wisest, inspiration of
his dreams.
PREFACE.
WITH the younger class of my readers this work has had the good fortune
to find especial favour; perhaps because it is in itself a collection of
the thoughts and sentiments that constitute the Romance of youth. It has
little to do with the positive truths of our actual life, and does not
pretend to deal with the larger passions and more stirring interests
of our kind. It is but an episode out of the graver epic of human
destinies. It requires no explanation of its purpose, and no analysis of
its story; the one is evident, the other simple,--the first seeks but
to illustrate visible nature through the poetry of the affections; the
other is but the narrative of the most real of mortal sorrows, which the
Author attempts to take out of the region of pain by various accessories
from the Ideal. The connecting tale itself is but the string that binds
into a garland the wild-flowers cast upon a grave.
The descriptions of the Rhine have been considered by Germans
sufficiently faithful to render this tribute to their land and
their legends one of the popular guide-books along the course it
illustrates,--especially to such tourists as wish not only to take
in with the eye the inventory of the river, but to seize the peculiar
spirit which invests the wave and the bank with a beauty that can only
be made visible by reflection. He little comprehends the true charm of
the Rhine who gazes on the vines on the hill-tops without a thought of
the imaginary world with which their recesses have been peopled by the
graceful credulity of old; who surveys the steep ruins that overshadow
the water, untouched by one lesson from the pensive morality of Time.
Everywhere around us is the evidence of perished opinions and
departed races; everywhere around us, also, the rejoicing fertility of
unconquerable Nature, and the calm progress of Man himself through the
infinite cycles of decay. He who would judge adequately of a landscape
must regard it not only with the painter’s eye, but with the poet’s.
The feelings which the sight of any scene in Nature conveys to the
mind--more especially of any scene on which history or fiction has left
its trace--must depend upon our sympathy with those associations which
make up what may be called the spiritual character of the spot. If
indifferent to those associations, we should see only hedgerows and
ploughed land in the battle-field of Bannockburn; and the traveller
would but look on a dreary waste, whether he stood amidst the piles of
the Druid on Salisbury plain, or trod his bewildered way over the broad
expanse on which the Chaldaean first learned to number the stars.
To the former editions of this tale was prefixed a poem on “The Ideal,”
which had all the worst faults of the author’s earliest compositions
in verse. The present poem (with the exception of a very few lines) has
been entirely rewritten, and has at least the comparative merit of being
less vague in the thought, and less unpolished in the diction, than that
which it replaces.
CONTENTS.
THE IDEAL WORLD
THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE
CHAPTER I.
In which the Reader is Introduced to Queen Nymphalin
CHAPTER II.
The Lovers
CHAPTER III.
Feelings
CHAPTER IV.
The Maid of Malines
CHAPTER V.
Rotterdam.--The Character of the Dutch.--Their Resemblance to the
Germans.--A Dispute between Vane and Trevylyan, after the manner of the
ancient Novelists, as to which is preferable, the Life of Action, or the
Life of Repose.--Trevylyan’s Contrast between Literary Ambition and the
Ambition of Public Life
CHAPTER VI.
Gorcum.--The Tour of the Virtues: a Philosopher’s Tale
CHAPTER VII.
Cologne.--The Traces of the Roman Yoke.--The Church of St.
Maria.--Trevylyan’s Reflections on the Monastic Life.--The Tomb of the
Three Kings.--An Evening Excursion on the Rhine
CHAPTER VIII.
The Soul in Purgatory; or, Love Stronger than Death
CHAPTER IX.
The Scenery of the Rhine analogous to the German Literary Genius.--The
Drachenfels
CHAPTER X.
The Legend of Roland.--The Adventures of Nymphalin on the Island of
Nonnewerth.--Her Song.--The Decay of the Fairy-Faith in England
CHAPTER XI.
Wherein the Reader is made Spectator with the English Fairies of the
Scenes and Beings that are beneath the Earth
CHAPTER XII.
The Wooing of Master Fox
CHAPTER XIII.
The Tomb of a Father of Many Children
CHAPTER XIV.
The Fairy’s Cave, and the Fairy’s Wish
CHAPTER XV.
The Banks of the Rhine.--From the Drachenfels to Brohl.--An Incident that
suffices in this Tale for an Epoch
CHAPTER XVI.
Gertrude.--The Excursion to Hammerstein.--Thoughts
CHAPTER XVII.
Letter from Trevylyan to -----
CHAPTER XVIII.
Coblentz.--Excursion to the Mountains of Taunus; Roman Tower in the
Valley of Ehrenbreitstein.--Travel, its Pleasures estimated differently
by the Young and the Old.--The Student of Heidelberg: his Criticisms on
German Literature
CHAPTER XIX.
The Fallen Star; or, the History of a False Religion
CHAPTER XX.
Glenhausen.--The Power of Love in Sanctified Places.--A Portrait of
Frederick Barbarossa.--The Ambition of Men finds no adequate Sympathy in
Women
CHAPTER XXI.
View of Ehrenbreitstein.--A New Alarm in Gertrude’s Health.--Trarbach
CHAPTER XXII.
The Double Life.--Trevylyan’s Fate.--Sorrow the Parent of
Fame.--Niederlahnstein.--Dreams
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Life of Dreams
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Brothers
CHAPTER XXV.
The Immortality of the Soul.--A Common Incident not before Described.
--Trevylyan and Gertrude
CHAPTER XXVI.
In which the Reader will learn how the Fairies were received by the
Sovereigns of the Mines.--The Complaint of the Last of the Fauns.--The
Red Huntsman.--The Storm.--Death
CHAPTER XXVII.
Thurmberg.--A Storm upon the Rhine.--The Ruins of Rheinfels.--Peril
Unfelt by Love.--The Echo of the Lurlei-berg.--St. Goar.--Kaub,
Gutenfels, and Pfalzgrafenstein.--A certain Vastness of Mind in the First
Hermits.--The Scenery of the Rhine to Bacharach
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Voyage to Bingen.--The Simple Incidents in this Tale Excused.--The
Situation and Character of Gertrude.--The Conversation of the Lovers in
the Tempest.--A Fact Contradicted.--Thoughts occasioned by a Madhouse
amongst the most Beautiful Landscapes of the Rhine
CHAPTER XXIX.
Ellfeld.--Mayence.--Heidelberg.--A Conversation between Vane and the
German Student.--The Ruins of the Castle of Heidelberg and its Solitary
Habitant
CHAPTER XXX.
No Part of the Earth really Solitary.--The Song of the Fairies.--The
Sacred Spot.--The Witch of the Evil Winds.--The Spell and the Duty of the
Fairies
CHAPTER XXXI.
Gertrude and Trevylyan, when the former is awakened to the Approach of
Death
CHAPTER XXXII.
A Spot to be Buried in
CHAPTER THE LAST
The Conclusion of this Tale
THE IDEAL WORLD
I.
THE IDEAL WORLD,--ITS REALM IS EVERYWHERE AROUND US; ITS INHABITANTS ARE
THE IMMORTAL PERSONIFICATIONS OF ALL BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS; TO THAT WORLD WE
ATTAIN BY THE REPOSE OF THE SENSES.
AROUND “this visible diurnal sphere”
There floats a World that girds us like the space;
On wandering clouds and gliding beams career
Its ever-moving murmurous Populace.
There, all the lovelier thoughts conceived below
Ascending live, and in celestial shapes.
To that bright World, O Mortal, wouldst thou go?
Bind but thy senses, and thy soul escapes:
To care, to sin, to passion close thine eyes;
Sleep in the flesh, and see the Dreamland rise!
Hark to the gush of golden waterfalls,
Or knightly tromps at Archimagian Walls!
In the green hush of Dorian Valleys mark
The River Maid her amber tresses knitting;
When glow-worms twinkle under coverts dark,
And silver clouds o’er summer stars are flitting,
With jocund elves invade “the Moone’s sphere,
Or hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear;” *
Or, list! what time the roseate urns of dawn
Scatter fresh dews, and the first skylark weaves
Joy into song, the blithe Arcadian Faun
Piping to wood-nymphs under Bromian leaves,
While slowly gleaming through the purple glade
Come Evian’s panther car, and the pale Naxian Maid.
* “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Such, O Ideal World, thy habitants!
All the fair children of creative creeds,
All the lost tribes of Fantasy are thine,--
From antique Saturn in Dodonian haunts,
Or Pan’s first music waked from shepherd reeds,
To the last sprite when Heaven’s pale lamps decline,
Heard wailing soft along the solemn Rhine.
II.
OUR DREAMS BELONG TO THE IDEAL.--THE DIVINER LOVE FOR WHICH YOUTH SIGHS
NOT ATTAINABLE IN LIFE, BUT THE PURSUIT OF THAT LOVE BEYOND THE WORLD OF
THE SENSES PURIFIES THE SOUL AND AWAKES THE GENIUS.--PETRARCH.--DANTE.
Thine are the Dreams that pass the Ivory Gates,
With prophet shadows haunting poet eyes!
Thine the belov’d illusions youth creates
From the dim haze of its own happy skies.
In vain we pine; we yearn on earth to win
The being of the heart, our boyhood’s dream.
The Psyche and the Eros ne’er have been,
Save in Olympus, wedded! As a stream
Glasses a star, so life the ideal love;
Restless the stream below, serene the orb above!
Ever the soul the senses shall deceive;
Here custom chill, there kinder fate bereave:
For mortal lips unmeet eternal vows!
And Eden’s flowers for Adam’s mournful brows!
We seek to make the moment’s angel guest
The household dweller at a human hearth;
We chase the bird of Paradise, whose nest
Was never found amid the bowers of earth.*
* According to a belief in the East, which is associated with one
of the loveliest and most familiar of Oriental superstitions,
the bird of Paradise is never seen to rest upon the earth, and
its nest is never to be found.
Yet loftier joys the vain pursuit may bring,
Than sate the senses with the boons of time;
The bird of Heaven hath still an upward wing,
The steps it lures are still the steps that climb;
And in the ascent although the soil be bare,
More clear the daylight and more pure the air.
Let Petrarch’s heart the human mistress lose,
He mourns the Laura but to win the Muse.
Could all the charms which Georgian maids combine
Delight the soul of the dark Florentine,
Like one chaste dream of childlike Beatrice
Awaiting Hell’s dark pilgrim in the skies,
Snatched from below to be the guide above,
And clothe Religion in the form of Love?*
* It is supposed by many of the commentators on Dante, that in
the form of his lost Beatrice, who guides him in his Vision
of Heaven, he allegorizes Religious Faith.
III.
GENIUS, LIFTING ITS LIFE TO THE IDEAL, BECOMES ITSELF A PURE IDEA: IT
MUST COMPREHEND ALL EXISTENCE, ALL HUMAN SINS AND SUFFERINGS; BUT IN
COMPREHENDING, IT TRANSMUTES THEM.--THE POET IN HIS TWO-FOLD BEING,--THE
ACTUAL AND THE IDEAL.--THE INFLUENCE OF GENIUS OVER THE STERNEST
REALITIES OF EARTH; OVER OUR PASSIONS; WARS AND SUPERSTITIONS.--ITS
IDENTITY IS WITH HUMAN PROGRESS.--ITS AGENCY, EVEN WHERE UNACKNOWLEDGED,
IS UNIVERSAL.
Oh, thou true Iris! sporting on thy bow
Of tears and smiles! Jove’s herald, Poetry,
Thou reflex image of all joy and woe,
_Both_ fused in light by thy dear fantasy!
Lo! from the clay how Genius lifts its life,
And grows one pure Idea, one calm soul!
True, its own clearness must reflect our strife;
True, its completeness must comprise our whole;
But as the sun transmutes the sullen hues
Of marsh-grown vapours into vermeil dyes,
And melts them later into twilight dews,
Shedding on flowers the baptism of the skies;
So glows the Ideal in the air we breathe,
So from the fumes of sorrow and of sin,
Doth its warm light in rosy colours wreathe
Its playful cloudland, storing balms within.
Survey the Poet in his mortal mould,
Man, amongst men, descended from his throne!
The moth that chased the star now frets the fold,
Our cares, our faults, our follies are his own.
Passions as idle, and desires as vain,
Vex the wild heart, and dupe the erring brain.
From Freedom’s field the recreant Horace flies
To kiss the hand by which his country dies;
From Mary’s grave the mighty Peasant turns,
And hoarse with orgies rings the laugh of Burns.
While Rousseau’s lips a lackey’s vices own,--
Lips that could draw the thunder on a throne!
But when from Life the Actual GENIUS springs,
When, self-transformed by its own magic rod,
It snaps the fetters and expands the wings,
And drops the fleshly garb that veiled the god,
How the mists vanish as the form ascends!
How in its aureole every sunbeam blends!
By the Arch-Brightener of Creation seen,
How dim the crowns on perishable brows!
The snows of Atlas melt beneath the sheen,
Through Thebaid caves the rushing splendour flows.
Cimmerian glooms with Asian beams are bright,
And Earth reposes in a belt of light.
Now stern as Vengeance shines the awful form,
Armed with the bolt and glowing through the storm;
Sets the great deeps of human passion free,
And whelms the bulwarks that would breast the sea.
Roused by its voice the ghastly Wars arise,
Mars reddens earth, the Valkyrs pale the skies;
Dim Superstition from her hell escapes,
With all her shadowy brood of monster shapes;
Here life itself the scowl of Typhon* takes;
There Conscience shudders at Alecto’s snakes;
From Gothic graves at midnight yawning wide,
In gory cerements gibbering spectres glide;
And where o’er blasted heaths the lightnings flame,
Black secret hags “do deeds without a name!”
Yet through its direst agencies of awe,
Light marks its presence and pervades its law,
And, like Orion when the storms are loud,
It links creation while it gilds a cloud.
By ruthless Thor, free Thought, frank Honour stand,
Fame’s grand desire, and zeal for Fatherland.
The grim Religion of Barbarian Fear
With some Hereafter still connects the Here,
Lifts the gross sense to some spiritual source,
And thrones some Jove above the Titan Force,
Till, love completing what in awe began,
From the rude savage dawns the thoughtful man.
* The gloomy Typhon of Egypt assumes many of the mystic attributes
of the Principle of Life which, in the Grecian Apotheosis of the
Indian Bacchus, is represented in so genial a character of
exuberant joy and everlasting youth.
Then, oh, behold the Glorious comforter!
Still bright’ning worlds but gladd’ning now the hearth,
Or like the lustre of our nearest star,
Fused in the common atmosphere of earth.
It sports like hope upon the captive’s chain;
Descends in dreams upon the couch of pain;
To wonder’s realm allures the earnest child;
To the chaste love refines the instinct wild;
And as in waters the reflected beam,
Still where we turn, glides with us up the stream,
And while in truth the whole expanse is bright,
Yields to each eye its own fond path of light,--
So over life the rays of Genius fall,
Give each his track because illuming all.
IV.
FORGIVENESS TO THE ERRORS OF OUR BENEFACTORS.
Hence is that secret pardon we bestow
In the true instinct of the grateful heart,
Upon the Sons of Song. The good they do
In the clear world of their Uranian art
Endures forever; while the evil done
In the poor drama of their mortal scene,
Is but a passing cloud before the sun;
Space hath no record where the mist hath been.
Boots it to us if Shakspeare erred like man?
Why idly question that most mystic life?
Eno’ the giver in his gifts to scan;
To bless the sheaves with which thy fields are rife,
Nor, blundering, guess through what obstructive clay
The glorious corn-seed struggled up to day.
V.
THE IDEAL IS NOT CONFINED TO POETS.--ALGERNON SIDNEY RECOGNIZES HIS IDEAL
IN LIBERTY, AND BELIEVES IN ITS TRIUMPH WHERE THE MERE PRACTICAL MAN
COULD BEHOLD BUT ITS RUINS; YET LIBERTY IN THIS WORLD MUST EVER BE AN
IDEAL, AND THE LAND THAT IT PROMISES CAN BE FOUND BUT IN DEATH.
But not to you alone, O Sons Of Song,
The wings that float the loftier airs along.
Whoever lifts us from the dust we are,
Beyond the sensual to spiritual goals;
Who from the MOMENT and the SELF afar
By deathless deeds allures reluctant souls,
Gives the warm life to what the Limner draws,--
Plato but thought what godlike Cato was.*
Recall the Wars of England’s giant-born,
Is Elyot’s voice, is Hampden’s death in vain?
Have all the meteors of the vernal morn
But wasted light upon a frozen main?
Where is that child of Carnage, Freedom, flown?
The Sybarite lolls upon the martyr’s throne.
Lewd, ribald jests succeed to solemn zeal;
And things of silk to Cromwell’s men of steel.
Cold are the hosts the tromps of Ireton thrilled,
And hushed the senates Vane’s large presence filled.
In what strong heart doth the old manhood dwell?
Where art thou, Freedom? Look! in Sidney’s cell!
There still as stately stands the living Truth,
Smiling on age as it had smiled on youth.
Her forts dismantled, and her shrines o’erthrown,
The headsman’s block her last dread altar-stone,
No sanction left to Reason’s vulgar hope,
Far from the wrecks expands her prophet’s scope.
Millennial morns the tombs of Kedron gild,
The hands of saints the glorious walls rebuild,--
Till each foundation garnished with its gem,
High o’er Gehenna flames Jerusalem!
O thou blood-stained Ideal of the free,
Whose breath is heard in clarions,--Liberty!
Sublimer for thy grand illusions past,
Thou spring’st to Heaven,--Religion at the last.
Alike below, or commonwealths or thrones,
Where’er men gather some crushed victim groans;
Only in death thy real form we see,
All life is bondage,--souls alone are free.
Thus through the waste the wandering Hebrews went,
Fire on the march, but cloud upon the tent.
At last on Pisgah see the prophet stand,
Before his vision spreads the PROMISED LAND;
But where revealed the Canaan to his eye?--
Upon the mountain he ascends to die.
* What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was.--POPE.
VI.
YET ALL HAVE TWO ESCAPES INTO THE IDEAL WORLD; NAMELY, MEMORY AND
HOPE.--EXAMPLE OF HOPE IN YOUTH, HOWEVER EXCLUDED FROM ACTION AND
DESIRE.--NAPOLEON’S SON.
Yet whatsoever be our bondage here,
All have two portals to the phantom sphere.
What hath not glided through those gates that ope
Beyond the Hour, to MEMORY or to HOPE!
Give Youth the Garden,--still it soars above,
Seeks some far glory, some diviner love.
Place Age amidst the Golgotha,--its eyes
Still quit the graves, to rest upon the skies;
And while the dust, unheeded, moulders there,
Track some lost angel through cerulean air.
Lo! where the Austrian binds, with formal chain,
The crownless son of earth’s last Charlemagne,--
Him, at whose birth laughed all the violet vales
(While yet unfallen stood thy sovereign star,
O Lucifer of nations). Hark, the gales
Swell with the shout from all the hosts, whose war
Rended the Alps, and crimsoned Memphian Nile,--
“Way for the coming of the Conqueror’s Son:
Woe to the Merchant-Carthage of the Isle!
Woe to the Scythian ice-world of the Don!
O Thunder Lord, thy Lemnian bolts prepare,
The Eagle’s eyry hath its eagle heir!”
Hark, at that shout from north to south, gray Power
Quails on its weak, hereditary thrones;
And widowed mothers prophesy the hour
Of future carnage to their cradled sons.
What! shall our race to blood be thus consigned,
And Ate claim an heirloom in mankind?
Are these red lots unshaken in the urn?
Years pass; approach, pale Questioner, and learn
Chained to his rock, with brows that vainly frown,
The fallen Titan sinks in darkness down!
And sadly gazing through his gilded grate,
Behold the child whose birth was as a fate!
Far from the land in which his life began;
Walled from the healthful air of hardy man;
Reared by cold hearts, and watched by jealous eyes,
His guardians jailers, and his comrades spies.
Each trite convention courtly fears inspire
To stint experience and to dwarf desire;
Narrows the action to a puppet stage,
And trains the eaglet to the starling’s cage.
On the dejected brow and smileless cheek,
What weary thought the languid lines bespeak;
Till drop by drop, from jaded day to day,
The sickly life-streams ooze themselves away.
Yet oft in HOPE a boundless realm was thine,
That vaguest Infinite,--the Dream of Fame;
Son of the sword that first made kings divine,
Heir to man’s grandest royalty,--a Name!
Then didst thou burst upon the startled world,
And keep the glorious promise of thy birth;
Then were the wings that bear the bolt unfurled,
A monarch’s voice cried, “Place upon the earth!”
A new Philippi gained a second Rome,
And the Son’s sword avenged the greater Caesar’s doom.
VII.
EXAMPLE OF MEMORY AS LEADING TO THE IDEAL,--AMIDST LIFE HOWEVER HUMBLE,
AND IN A MIND HOWEVER IGNORANT.--THE VILLAGE WIDOW.
But turn the eye to life’s sequestered vale
And lowly roofs remote in hamlets green.
Oft in my boyhood where the moss-grown pale
Fenced quiet graves, a female form was seen;
Each eve she sought the melancholy ground,
And lingering paused, and wistful looked around.
If yet some footstep rustled through the grass,
Timorous she shrunk, and watched the shadow pass;
Then, when the spot lay lone amidst the gloom,
Crept to one grave too humble for a tomb,
There silent bowed her face above the dead,
For, if in prayer, the prayer was inly said;
Still as the moonbeam, paused her quiet shade,
Still as the moonbeam, through the yews to fade.
Whose dust thus hallowed by so fond a care?
What the grave saith not, let the heart declare.
On yonder green two orphan children played;
By yonder rill two plighted lovers strayed;
In yonder shrine two lives were blent in one,
And joy-bells chimed beneath a summer sun.
Poor was their lot, their bread in labour found;
No parent blessed them, and no kindred owned;
They smiled to hear the wise their choice condemn;
They loved--they loved--and love was wealth to them!
Hark--one short week--again the holy bell!
Still shone the sun; but dirge like boomed the knell,--
The icy hand had severed breast from breast;
Left life to toil, and summoned Death to rest.
Full fifty years since then have passed away,
Her cheek is furrowed, and her hair is gray.
Yet, when she speaks of _him_ (the times are rare),
Hear in her voice how youth still trembles there.
The very name of that young life that died
Still heaves the bosom, and recalls the bride.
Lone o’er the widow’s hearth those years have fled,
The daily toil still wins the daily bread;
No books deck sorrow with fantastic dyes;
Her fond romance her woman heart supplies;
And, haply in the few still moments given,
(Day’s taskwork done), to memory, death, and heaven,
To that unuttered poem may belong
Thoughts of such pathos as had beggared song.
VIII.
HENCE IN HOPE, MEMORY, AND PRAYER, ALL OF US ARE POETS.
Yes, while thou hopest, music fills the air,
While thou rememberest, life reclothes the clod;
While thou canst feel the electric chain of prayer,
Breathe but a thought, and be a soul with God!
Let not these forms of matter bound thine eye.
He who the vanishing point of Human things
Lifts from the landscape, lost amidst the sky,
Has found the Ideal which the poet sings,
Has pierced the pall around the senses thrown,
And is himself a poet, though unknown.
IX.
APPLICATION OF THE POEM TO THE TALE TO WHICH IT IS PREFIXED.--THE
RHINE,--ITS IDEAL CHARACTER IN ITS HISTORICAL AND LEGENDARY ASSOCIATIONS.
Eno’!--my song is closing, and to thee,
Land of the North, I dedicate its lay;
As I have done the simple tale to be
The drama of this prelude!
Faraway
Rolls the swift Rhine beneath the starry ray;
But to my ear its haunted waters sigh;
Its moonlight mountains glimmer on my eye;
On wave, on marge, as on a wizard’s glass,
Imperial ghosts in dim procession pass;
Lords of the wild, the first great Father-men,
Their fane the hill-top, and their home the glen;
Frowning they fade; a bridge of steel appears
With frank-eyed Caesar smiling through the spears;
The march moves onwards, and the mirror brings
The Gothic crowns of Carlovingian kings
Vanished alike! The Hermit rears his Cross,
And barbs neigh shrill, and plumes in tumult toss,
While (knighthood’s sole sweet conquest from the Moor)
Sings to Arabian lutes the Tourbadour.
Not yet, not yet; still glide some lingering shades,
Still breathe some murmurs as the starlight fades,
Still from her rock I hear the Siren call,
And see the tender ghost in Roland’s mouldering hall!
X.
APPLICATION OF THE POEM CONTINUED.--THE IDEAL LENDS ITS AID TO THE MOST
FAMILIAR AND THE MOST ACTUAL SORROW OF LIFE.--FICTION COMPARED TO
SLEEP,--IT STRENGTHENS WHILE IT SOOTHES.
Trite were the tale I tell of love and doom,
(Whose life hath loved not, whose not mourned a tomb?)
But fiction draws a poetry from grief,
As art its healing from the withered leaf.
Play thou, sweet Fancy, round the sombre truth,
Crown the sad Genius ere it lower the torch!
When death the altar and the victim youth,
Flutes fill the air, and garlands deck the porch.
As down the river drifts the Pilgrim sail,
Clothe the rude hill-tops, lull the Northern gale;
With childlike lore the fatal course beguile,
And brighten death with Love’s untiring smile.
Along the banks let fairy forms be seen
“By fountain clear, or spangled starlike sheen.” *
Let sound and shape to which the sense is dull
Haunt the soul opening on the Beautiful.
And when at length, the symbol voyage done,
Surviving Grief shrinks lonely from the sun,
By tender types show Grief what memories bloom
From lost delight, what fairies guard the tomb.
Scorn not the dream, O world-worn; pause a while,
New strength shall nerve thee as the dreams beguile,
Stung by the rest, less far shall seem the goal!
As sleep to life, so fiction to the soul.
* “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE
CHAPTER I. IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO QUEEN NYMPHALIN.
IN one of those green woods which belong so peculiarly to our island
(for the Continent has its forests, but England its woods) there lived,
a short time ago, a charming little fairy called Nymphalin. I believe
she is descended from a younger branch of the house of Mab; but perhaps
that may only be a genealogical fable, for your fairies are very
susceptible to the pride of ancestry, and it is impossible to deny that
they fall somewhat reluctantly into the liberal opinions so much in
vogue at the present day.
However that may be, it is quite certain that all the courtiers in
Nymphalin’s domain (for she was a queen fairy) made a point of asserting
her right to this illustrious descent; and accordingly she quartered the
Mab arms with her own,--three acorns vert, with a grasshopper rampant.
It was as merry a little court as could possibly be conceived, and on
a fine midsummer night it would have been worth while attending the
queen’s balls; that is to say, if you could have got a ticket, a favour
not obtained without great interest.
But, unhappily, until both men and fairies adopt Mr. Owen’s proposition,
and live in parallelograms, they will always be the victims of _ennui_.
And Nymphalin, who had been disappointed in love, and was still
unmarried, had for the last five or six months been exceedingly tired
even of giving balls. She yawned very frequently, and consequently
yawning became a fashion.
“But why don’t we have some new dances, my Pipalee?” said Nymphalin to
her favourite maid of honour; “these waltzes are very old-fashioned.”
“Very old-fashioned,” said Pipalee.
The queen gaped, and Pipalee did the same.
It was a gala night; the court was held in a lone and beautiful hollow,
with the wild brake closing round it on every side, so that no human
step could easily gain the spot. Wherever the shadows fell upon the
brake a glow-worm made a point of exhibiting itself, and the bright
August moon sailed slowly above, pleased to look down upon so charming
a scene of merriment; for they wrong the moon who assert that she has
an objection to mirth,--with the mirth of fairies she has all possible
sympathy. Here and there in the thicket the scarce honeysuckles--in
August honeysuckles are somewhat out of season--hung their rich
festoons, and at that moment they were crowded with the elderly fairies,
who had given up dancing and taken to scandal. Besides the honeysuckle
you might see the hawkweed and the white convolvulus, varying the soft
verdure of the thicket; and mushrooms in abundance had sprung up in
the circle, glittering in the silver moonlight, and acceptable beyond
measure to the dancers: every one knows how agreeable a thing tents are
in a _fete champetre_! I was mistaken in saying that the brake closed
the circle entirely round; for there was one gap, scarcely apparent to
mortals, through which a fairy at least might catch a view of a
brook that was close at hand, rippling in the stars, and checkered at
intervals by the rich weeds floating on the surface, interspersed
with the delicate arrowhead and the silver water-lily. Then the trees
themselves, in their prodigal variety of hues,--the blue, the purple,
the yellowing tint, the tender and silvery verdure, and the deep mass
of shade frowning into black; the willow, the elm, the ash, the fir, and
the lime, “and, best of all, Old England’s haunted oak;” these hues were
broken again into a thousand minor and subtler shades as the twinkling
stars pierced the foliage, or the moon slept with a richer light upon
some favoured glade.
It was a gala night; the elderly fairies, as I said before, were
chatting among the honeysuckles; the young were flirting, and dancing,
and making love; the middle-aged talked politics under the mushrooms;
and the queen herself and half-a-dozen of her favourites were yawning
their pleasure from a little mound covered with the thickest moss.
“It has been very dull, madam, ever since Prince Fayzenheim left us,”
said the fairy Nip.
The queen sighed.
“How handsome the prince is!” said Pipalee.
The queen blushed.
“He wore the prettiest dress in the world; and what a mustache!” cried
Pipalee, fanning herself with her left wing.
“He was a coxcomb,” said the lord treasurer, sourly. The lord treasurer
was the honestest and most disagreeable fairy at court; he was an
admirable husband, brother, son, cousin, uncle, and godfather,--it was
these virtues that had made him a lord treasurer. Unfortunately they
had not made him a sensible fairy. He was like Charles the Second in
one respect, for he never did a wise thing; but he was not like him in
another, for he very often said a foolish one.
The queen frowned.
“A young prince is not the worse for that,” retorted Pipalee. “Heigho!
does your Majesty think his Highness likely to return?”
“Don’t tease me,” said Nymphalin, pettishly.
The lord treasurer, by way of giving the conversation an agreeable
turn, reminded her Majesty that there was a prodigious accumulation
of business to see to, especially that difficult affair about the
emmet-wasp loan. Her Majesty rose; and leaning on Pipalee’s arm, walked
down to the supper tent.
“Pray,” said the fairy Trip to the fairy Nip, “what is all this talk
about Prince Fayzenheim? Excuse my ignorance; I am only just out, you
know.”
“Why,” answered Nip, a young courtier, not a marrying fairy, but very
seductive, “the story runs thus: Last summer a foreigner visited us,
calling himself Prince Fayzenheim: one of your German fairies, I fancy;
no great things, but an excellent waltzer. He wore long spurs, made out
of the stings of the horse-flies in the Black Forest; his cap sat on one
side, and his mustachios curled like the lip of the dragon-flower. He
was on his travels, and amused himself by making love to the queen. You
can’t fancy, dear Trip, how fond she was of hearing him tell stories
about the strange creatures of Germany,--about wild huntsmen,
water-sprites, and a pack of such stuff,” added Nip, contemptuously, for
Nip was a freethinker.
“In short?” said Trip.
“In short, she loved,” cried Nip, with a theatrical air.
“And the prince?”
“Packed up his clothes, and sent on his travelling-carriage, in order
that he might go at his ease on the top of a stage-pigeon; in short--as
you say--in short, he deserted the queen, and ever since she has set the
fashion of yawning.”
“It was very naughty in him,” said the gentle Trip.
“Ah, my dear creature,” cried Nip, “if it had been you to whom he had
paid his addresses!”
Trip simpered, and the old fairies from their seats in the honeysuckles
observed she was “sadly conducted;” but the Trips had never been too
respectable.
Meanwhile the queen, leaning on Pipalee, said, after a short pause, “Do
you know I have formed a plan!”
“How delightful!” cried Pipalee. “Another gala!”
“Pooh, surely even you must be tired with such levities: the spirit of
the age is no longer frivolous; and I dare say as the march of gravity
proceeds, we shall get rid of galas altogether.” The queen said this
with an air of inconceivable wisdom, for the “Society for the Diffusion
of General Stupefaction” had been recently established among the
fairies, and its tracts had driven all the light reading out of the
market. “The Penny Proser” had contributed greatly to the increase of
knowledge and yawning, so visibly progressive among the courtiers.
“No,” continued Nymphalin; “I have thought of something better than
galas. Let us travel!”
Pipalee clasped her hands in ecstasy.
“Where shall we travel?”
“Let us go up the Rhine,” said the queen, turning away her head. “We
shall be amazingly welcomed; there are fairies without number all the
way by its banks, and various distant connections of ours whose nature
and properties will afford interest and instruction to a philosophical
mind.”
“Number Nip, for instance,” cried the gay Pipalee.
“The Red Man!” said the graver Nymphalin.
“Oh, my queen, what an excellent scheme!” and Pipalee was so lively
during the rest of the night that the old fairies in the honeysuckle
insinuated that the lady of honour had drunk a buttercup too much of the
Maydew.
CHAPTER II. THE LOVERS.
I WISH only for such readers as give themselves heart and soul up to
me,--if they begin to cavil I have done with them; their fancy should
put itself entirely under my management; and, after all, ought they not
to be too glad to get out of this hackneyed and melancholy world, to be
run away with by an author who promises them something new?
From the heights of Bruges, a Mortal and his betrothed gazed upon the
scene below. They saw the sun set slowly amongst purple masses of cloud,
and the lover turned to his mistress and sighed deeply; for her cheek
was delicate in its blended roses, beyond the beauty that belongs to
the hues of health; and when he saw the sun sinking from the world, the
thought came upon him that _she_ was his sun, and the glory that
she shed over his life might soon pass away into the bosom of the
“ever-during Dark.” But against the clouds rose one of the many spires
that characterize the town of Bruges; and on that spire, tapering into
heaven, rested the eyes of Gertrude Vane. The different objects that
caught the gaze of each was emblematic both of the different channel of
their thoughts and the different elements of their nature: he thought of
the sorrow, she of the consolation; his heart prophesied of the passing
away from earth, hers of the ascension into heaven. The lower part of
the landscape was wrapped in shade; but just where the bank curved round
in a mimic bay, the waters caught the sun’s parting smile, and rippled
against the herbage that clothed the shore, with a scarcely noticeable
wave. There are two of the numerous mills which are so picturesque a
feature of that country, standing at a distance from each other on the
rising banks, their sails perfectly still in the cool silence of the
evening, and adding to the rustic tranquillity which breathed around.
For to me there is something in the still sails of one of those
inventions of man’s industry peculiarly eloquent of repose: the rest
seems typical of the repose of our own passions, short and uncertain,
contrary to their natural ordination; and doubly impressive from the
feeling which admonishes us how precarious is the stillness, how utterly
dependent on every wind rising at any moment and from any quarter of
the heavens! They saw before them no living forms, save of one or two
peasants yet lingering by the water-side.
Trevylyan drew closer to his Gertrude; for his love was inexpressibly
tender, and his vigilant anxiety for her made his stern frame feel the
first coolness of the evening even before she felt it herself.
“Dearest, let me draw your mantle closer round you.”
Gertrude smiled her thanks.
“I feel better than I have done for weeks,” said she; “and when once we
get into the Rhine, you will see me grow so strong as to shock all your
interest for me.”
“Ah, would to Heaven my interest for you may be put to such an ordeal!”
said Trevylyan; and they turned slowly to the inn, where Gertrude’s
father already awaited them.
Trevylyan was of a wild, a resolute, and an active nature. Thrown on
the world at the age of sixteen, he had passed his youth in alternate
pleasure, travel, and solitary study. At the age in which manhood is
least susceptible to caprice, and most perhaps to passion, he fell in
love with the loveliest person that ever dawned upon a poet’s vision.
I say this without exaggeration, for Gertrude Vane’s was indeed
the beauty, but the perishable beauty, of a dream. It happened most
singularly to Trevylyan (but he was a singular man), that being
naturally one whose affections it was very difficult to excite, he
should have fallen in love at first sight with a person whose disease,
already declared, would have deterred any other heart from risking
its treasures on a bark so utterly unfitted for the voyage of life.
Consumption, but consumption in its most beautiful shape, had set its
seal upon Gertrude Vane, when Trevylyan first saw her, and at once
loved. He knew the danger of the disease; he did not, except at
intervals, deceive himself; he wrestled against the new passion: but,
stern as his nature was, he could not conquer it. He loved, he confessed
his love, and Gertrude returned it.
In a love like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,--it is
essentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear,
and, scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel of
the senses, breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those lofty
aspirations, which pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is
“the desire of the moth for the star;” it is the love of the soul!
Gertrude was advised by the faculty to try a southern climate; but
Gertrude was the daughter of a German mother, and her young fancy had
been nursed in all the wild legends and the alluring visions that
belong to the children of the Rhine. Her imagination, more romantic than
classic, yearned for the vine-clad hills and haunted forests which are
so fertile in their spells to those who have once drunk, even sparingly,
of the Literature of the North. Her desire strongly expressed, her
declared conviction that if any change of scene could yet arrest the
progress of her malady it would be the shores of the river she had so
longed to visit, prevailed with her physicians and her father, and they
consented to that pilgrimage along the Rhine on which Gertrude, her
father, and her lover were now bound.
It was by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from the
heights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining on
the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks
of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer
(for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling
_cortege_), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little
elf, had gone round the town to reconnoitre.
“Bless me!” said the lord treasurer; “what a mad freak is this! Crossing
that immense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this?
One may see that the fairies thrive ill here.”
“You are always discontented, my lord,” said Pipalee; “but then you are
somewhat too old to travel,--at least, unless you go in your nutshell
and four.”
The lord treasurer did not like this remark, so he muttered a peevish
pshaw, and took a pinch of honeysuckle dust to console himself for being
forced to put up with so much frivolity.
At this moment, ere the moon was yet at her middest height, Nymphalin
joined her subjects.
“I have just returned,” said she, with a melancholy expression on her
countenance, “from a scene that has almost renewed in me that
sympathy with human beings which of late years our race has well-nigh
relinquished.
“I hurried through the town without noticing much food for adventure.
I paused for a moment on a fat citizen’s pillow, and bade him dream of
love. He woke in a fright, and ran down to see that his cheeses
were safe. I swept with a light wing over a politician’s eyes, and
straightway he dreamed of theatres and music. I caught an undertaker in
his first nap, and I have left him whirled into a waltz. For what would
be sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber,
in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer,
and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was
on the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel of
Purity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holy
thoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,--of a
happy home, of the kisses of her young lover, of eternal faith, and
unwaning tenderness. Let her at least enjoy in dreams what Fate
has refused to Truth! And, passing from the room, I found her lover
stretched in his cloak beside the door; for he reads with a feverish and
desperate prophecy the doom that waits her; and so loves he the very
air she breathes, the very ground she treads, that when she has left
his sight he creeps, silently and unknown to her, to the nearest spot
hallowed by her presence, anxious that while yet she is on earth not an
hour, not a moment, should be wasted upon other thoughts than those that
belong to her; and feeling a security, a fearful joy, in lessening the
distance that _now_ only momentarily divides them. And that love seemed
to me not as the love of the common world, and I stayed my wings
and looked upon it as a thing that centuries might pass and bring no
parallel to, in its beauty and its melancholy truth. But I kept away the
sleep from the lover’s eyes, for well I knew that sleep was a tyrant,
that shortened the brief time of waking tenderness for the living, yet
spared him; and one sad, anxious thought of her was sweeter, in spite of
its sorrow, than the brightest of fairy dreams. So I left him awake,
and watching there through the long night, and felt that the children
of earth have still something that unites them to the spirits of a finer
race, so long as they retain amongst them the presence of real love!”
And oh! is there not a truth also in our fictions of the Unseen World?
Are there not yet bright lingerers by the forest and the stream? Do the
moon and the soft stars look out on no delicate and winged forms bathing
in their light? Are the fairies and the invisible hosts but the children
of our dreams, and not their inspiration? Is that all a delusion which
speaks from the golden page? And is the world only given to harsh and
anxious travellers that walk to and fro in pursuit of no gentle shadows?
Are the chimeras of the passions the sole spirits of the universe? No!
while my remembrance treasures in its deepest cell the image of one no
more,--one who was “not of the earth, earthy;” one in whom love was the
essence of thoughts divine; one whose shape and mould, whose heart and
genius, would, had Poesy never before dreamed it, have called forth
the first notion of spirits resembling mortals, but not of them,--no,
Gertrude! while I remember you, the faith, the trust in brighter shapes
and fairer natures than the world knows of, comes clinging to my heart;
and still will I think that Fairies might have watched over your sleep
and Spirits have ministered to your dreams.
CHAPTER III. FEELINGS.
GERTRUDE and her companions proceeded by slow and, to her, delightful
stages to Rotterdam. Trevylyan sat by her side, and her hand was ever
in his; and when her delicate frame became sensible of fatigue, her head
drooped on his shoulder as its natural resting-place. Her father was
a man who had lived long enough to have encountered many reverses of
fortune, and they had left him, as I am apt to believe long adversity
usually does leave its prey, somewhat chilled and somewhat hardened to
affection; passive and quiet of hope, resigned to the worst as to
the common order of events, and expecting little from the best, as an
unlooked-for incident in the regularity of human afflictions. He was
insensible of his daughter’s danger, for he was not one whom the fear
of love endows with prophetic vision; and he lived tranquilly in the
present, without asking what new misfortune awaited him in the future.
Yet he loved his child, his only child, with whatever of affection
was left him by the many shocks his heart had received; and in her
approaching connection with one rich and noble as Trevylyan, he
felt even something bordering upon pleasure. Lapped in the apathetic
indifference of his nature, he leaned back in the carriage, enjoying the
bright weather that attended their journey, and sensible--for he was one
of fine and cultivated taste--of whatever beauties of nature or remains
of art varied their course. A companion of this sort was the most
agreeable that two persons never needing a third could desire; he left
them undisturbed to the intoxication of their mutual presence; he marked
not the interchange of glances; he listened not to the whisper, the low
delicious whisper, with which the heart speaks its sympathy to heart. He
broke not that charmed silence which falls over us when the thoughts are
full, and words leave nothing to explain; that repose of feeling; that
certainty that we are understood without the effort of words, which
makes the real luxury of intercourse and the true enchantment of travel.
What a memory hours like these bequeath, after we have settled down into
the calm occupation of common life! How beautiful, through the vista of
years, seems that brief moonlight track upon the waters of our youth!
And Trevylyan’s nature, which, as I have said before, was naturally
hard and stern, which was hot, irritable, ambitious, and prematurely
tinctured with the policy and lessons of the world, seemed utterly
changed by the peculiarities of his love. Every hour, every moment was
full of incident to him; every look of Gertrude’s was entered in the
tablets of his heart; so that his love knew no languor, it required no
change: he was absorbed in it,--_it was himself_! And he was soft, and
watchful as the step of a mother by the couch of her sick child;
the lion within him was tamed by indomitable love; the sadness, the
presentiment, that was mixed with all his passion for Gertrude, filled
him too with that poetry of feeling which is the result of thoughts
weighing upon us, and not to be expressed by ordinary language. In this
part of their journey, as I find by the date, were the following lines
written; they are to be judged as the lines of one in whom emotion and
truth were the only inspiration:--
I. As leaves left darkling in the flush of day,
When glints the glad sun checkering o’er the tree,
I see the green earth brightening in the ray,
Which only casts a shadow upon me!
II. What are the beams, the flowers, the glory, all
Life’s glow and gloss, the music and the bloom,
When every sun but speeds the Eternal Pall,
And Time is Death that dallies with the Tomb?
III. And yet--oh yet, so young, so pure!--the while
Fresh laugh the rose-hues round youth’s morning sky,
That voice, those eyes, the deep love of that smile,
Are they not soul--_all_ soul--and _can_ they die?
IV. Are there the words “NO MORE” for thoughts like ours?
Must the bark sink upon so soft a wave?
Hath the short summer of thy life no flowers
But those which bloom above thine early grave?
V. O God! and what is life, that I should live?
(Hath not the world enow of common clay?)
And she--the Rose--whose life a soul could give
To the void desert, sigh its sweets away?
VI. And I that love thee thus, to whom the air,
Blest by thy breath, makes heaven where’er it be,
Watch thy cheek wane, and smile away despair,
Lest it should dim one hour yet left to Thee.
VII. Still let me conquer self; oh, still conceal
By the smooth brow the snake that coils below;
Break, break my heart! it comforts yet to feel
That _she_ dreams on, unwakened by my woe!
VIII. Hushed, where the Star’s soft angel loves to keep
Watch o’er their tide, the morning waters roll;
So glides my spirit,--darkness in the deep,
But o’er the wave the presence of thy soul!
Gertrude had not as yet the presentiments that filled the soul of
Trevylyan. She thought too little of herself to know her danger, and
those hours to her were hours of unmingled sweetness. Sometimes, indeed,
the exhaustion of her disease tinged her spirits with a vague sadness,
an abstraction came over her, and a languor she vainly struggled
against. These fits of dejection and gloom touched Trevylyan to the
quick; his eye never ceased to watch them, nor his heart to soothe.
Often when he marked them, he sought to attract her attention from what
he fancied, though erringly, a sympathy with his own forebodings, and
to lead her young and romantic imagination through the temporary
beguilements of fiction; for Gertrude was yet in the first bloom of
youth, and all the dews of beautiful childhood sparkled freshly from the
virgin blossoms of her mind. And Trevylyan, who had passed some of his
early years among the students of Leipsic, and was deeply versed in the
various world of legendary lore, ransacked his memory for such tales
as seemed to him most likely to win her interest; and often with false
smiles entered into the playful tale, or oftener, with more faithful
interest, into the graver legend of trials that warned yet beguiled them
from their own. Of such tales I have selected but a few; I know not that
they are the least unworthy of repetition,--they are those which many
recollections induce me to repeat the most willingly. Gertrude loved
these stories, for she had not yet lost, by the coldness of the world,
one leaf from that soft and wild romance which belonged to her beautiful
mind; and, more than all, she loved the sound of a voice which every
day became more and more musical to her ear. “Shall I tell you,” said
Trevylyan, one morning, as he observed her gloomier mood stealing over
the face of Gertrude,--“shall I tell you, ere yet we pass into the dull
land of Holland, a story of Malines, whose spires we shall shortly
see?” Gertrude’s face brightened at once, and as she leaned back in the
carriage as it whirled rapidly along, and fixed her deep blue eyes on
Trevylyan, he began the following tale.
CHAPTER IV. THE MAID OF MALINES.
IT was noonday in the town of Malines, or Mechlin, as the English
usually term it; the Sabbath bell had summoned the inhabitants to
divine worship; and the crowd that had loitered round the Church of St.
Rembauld had gradually emptied itself within the spacious aisles of the
sacred edifice.
A young man was standing in the street, with his eyes bent on the
ground, and apparently listening for some sound; for without raising his
looks from the rude pavement, he turned to every corner of it with an
intent and anxious expression of countenance. He held in one hand a
staff, in the other a long slender cord, the end of which trailed on
the ground; every now and then he called, with a plaintive voice, “Fido,
Fido, come back! Why hast thou deserted me?” Fido returned not; the dog,
wearied of confinement, had slipped from the string, and was at play
with his kind in a distant quarter of the town, leaving the blind man to
seek his way as he might to his solitary inn.
By and by a light step passed through the street, and the young
stranger’s face brightened.
“Pardon me,” said he, turning to the spot where his quick ear had
caught the sound, “and direct me, if you are not much pressed for a few
moments’ time, to the hotel ‘Mortier d’Or.’”
It was a young woman, whose dress betokened that she belonged to the
middling class of life, whom he thus addressed. “It is some distance
hence, sir,” said she; “but if you continue your way straight on for
about a hundred yards, and then take the second turn to your right
hand--”
“Alas!” interrupted the stranger, with a melancholy smile, “your
direction will avail me little; my dog has deserted me, and I am blind!”
There was something in these words, and in the stranger’s voice, which
went irresistibly to the heart of the young woman. “Pray forgive me,”
she said, almost with tears in her eyes, “I did not perceive your--”
misfortune, she was about to say, but she checked herself with an
instinctive delicacy. “Lean upon me, I will conduct you to the door;
nay, sir,” observing that he hesitated, “I have time enough to spare, I
assure you.”
The stranger placed his hand on the young woman’s arm; and though
Lucille was naturally so bashful that even her mother would laughingly
reproach her for the excess of a maiden virtue, she felt not the least
pang of shame, as she found herself thus suddenly walking through the
streets of Malines along with a young stranger, whose dress and air
betokened him of rank superior to her own.
“Your voice is very gentle,” said he, after a pause; “and that,” he
added, with a slight sigh, “is the only criterion by which I know the
young and the beautiful!” Lucille now blushed, and with a slight mixture
of pain in the blush, for she knew well that to beauty she had no
pretension. “Are you a native of this town?” continued he.
“Yes, sir; my father holds a small office in the customs, and my mother
and I eke out his salary by making lace. We are called poor, but we do
not feel it, sir.”
“You are fortunate! there is no wealth like the heart’s
wealth,--content,” answered the blind man, mournfully.
“And, monsieur,” said Lucille, feeling angry with herself that she had
awakened a natural envy in the stranger’s mind, and anxious to change
the subject--“and, monsieur, has he been long at Malines?”
“But yesterday. I am passing through the Low Countries on a tour;
perhaps you smile at the tour of a blind man, but it is wearisome
even to the blind to rest always in the same place. I thought during
church-time, when the streets were empty, that I might, by the help of
my dog, enjoy safely at least the air, if not the sight of the town;
but there are some persons, methinks, who cannot have even a dog for a
friend!”
The blind man spoke bitterly,--the desertion of his dog had touched
him to the core. Lucille wiped her eyes. “And does Monsieur travel then
alone?” said she; and looking at his face more attentively than she had
yet ventured to do, she saw that he was scarcely above two-and-twenty.
“His father, and his _mother_,” she added, with an emphasis on the last
word, “are they not with him?”
“I am an orphan!” answered the stranger; “and I have neither brother nor
sister.”
The desolate condition of the blind man quite melted Lucille; never had
she been so strongly affected. She felt a strange flutter at the heart,
a secret and earnest sympathy, that attracted her at once towards him.
She wished that Heaven had suffered her to be his sister!
The contrast between the youth and the form of the stranger, and the
affliction which took hope from the one and activity from the other,
increased the compassion he excited. His features were remarkably
regular, and had a certain nobleness in their outline; and his frame
was gracefully and firmly knit, though he moved cautiously and with no
cheerful step.
They had now passed into a narrow street leading towards the hotel,
when they heard behind them the clatter of hoofs; and Lucille, looking
hastily back, saw that a troop of the Belgian horse was passing through
the town.
She drew her charge close by the wall, and trembling with fear for
him, she stationed herself by his side. The troop passed at a full trot
through the street; and at the sound of their clanging arms, and the
ringing hoofs of their heavy chargers, Lucille might have seen, had
she looked at the blind man’s face, that its sad features kindled
with enthusiasm, and his head was raised proudly from its wonted and
melancholy bend. “Thank Heaven!” she said, as the troop had nearly
passed them, “the danger is over!” Not so. One of the last two soldiers
who rode abreast was unfortunately mounted on a young and unmanageable
horse. The rider’s oaths and digging spur only increased the fire and
impatience of the charger; it plunged from side to side of the narrow
street.
“Look to yourselves!” cried the horseman, as he was borne on to the
place where Lucille and the stranger stood against the wall. “Are ye
mad? Why do you not run?”
“For Heaven’s sake, for mercy’s sake, he is blind!” cried Lucille,
clinging to the stranger’s side.
“Save yourself, my kind guide!” said the stranger. But Lucille dreamed
not of such desertion. The trooper wrested the horse’s head from the
spot where they stood; with a snort, as it felt the spur, the enraged
animal lashed out with its hind-legs; and Lucille, unable to save
_both_, threw herself before the blind man, and received the shock
directed against him; her slight and delicate arm fell broken by her
side, the horseman was borne onward. “Thank God, _you_ are saved!” was
poor Lucille’s exclamation; and she fell, overcome with pain and terror,
into the arms which the stranger mechanically opened to receive her.
“My guide! my friend!” cried he, “you are hurt, you--”
“No, sir,” interrupted Lucille, faintly, “I am better, I am well. _This_
arm, if you please,--we are not far from your hotel now.”
But the stranger’s ear, tutored to every inflection of voice, told
him at once of the pain she suffered. He drew from her by degrees the
confession of the injury she had sustained; but the generous girl did
not tell him it had been incurred solely in his protection. He now
insisted on reversing their duties, and accompanying _her_ to her home;
and Lucille, almost fainting with pain, and hardly able to move, was
forced to consent. But a few steps down the next turning stood the
humble mansion of her father. They reached it; and Lucille scarcely
crossed the threshold, before she sank down, and for some minutes was
insensible to pain. It was left to the stranger to explain, and to
beseech them immediately to send for a surgeon, “the most skilful, the
most practised in the town,” said he. “See, I am rich, and this is the
least I can do to atone to your generous daughter, for not forsaking
even a stranger in peril.”
He held out his purse as he spoke, but the father refused the offer; and
it saved the blind man some shame, that he could not see the blush of
honest resentment with which so poor a species of renumeration was put
aside.
The young man stayed till the surgeon arrived, till the arm was set; nor
did he depart until he had obtained a promise from the mother that he
should learn the next morning how the sufferer had passed the night.
The next morning, indeed, he had intended to quit a town that offers but
little temptation to the traveller; but he tarried day after day, until
Lucille herself accompanied her mother, to assure him of her recovery.
You know, at least I do, dearest Gertrude, that there is such a thing as
love at the first meeting,--a secret, an unaccountable affinity between
persons (strangers before) which draws them irresistibly together,--as
if there were truth in Plato’s beautiful fantasy, that our souls were
a portion of the stars, and that spirits, thus attracted to each other,
have drawn their original light from the same orb, and yearn for a
renewal of their former union. Yet without recurring to such fanciful
solutions of a daily mystery, it was but natural that one in the forlorn
and desolate condition of Eugene St. Amand should have felt a certain
tenderness for a person who had so generously suffered for his sake.
The darkness to which he was condemned did not shut from his mind’s eye
the haunting images of Ideal beauty; rather, on the contrary, in his
perpetual and unoccupied solitude, he fed the reveries of an imagination
naturally warm, and a heart eager for sympathy and commune.
He had said rightly that his only test of beauty was in the melody of
voice; and never had a softer or more thrilling tone than that of the
young maiden touched upon his ear. Her exclamation, so beautifully
denying self, so devoted in its charity, “Thank God, _you_ are saved!”
uttered too in the moment of her own suffering, rang constantly upon his
soul, and he yielded, without precisely defining their nature, to vague
and delicious sentiments, that his youth had never awakened to till
then. And Lucille--the very accident that had happened to her on his
behalf only deepened the interest she had already conceived for one who,
in the first flush of youth, was thus cut off from the glad objects of
life, and left to a night of years desolate and alone. There is, to your
beautiful and kindly sex, a natural inclination to _protect_. This makes
them the angels of sickness, the comforters of age, the fosterers
of childhood; and this feeling, in Lucille peculiarly developed, had
already inexpressibly linked her compassionate nature to the lot of the
unfortunate traveller. With ardent affections, and with thoughts beyond
her station and her years, she was not without that modest vanity
which made her painfully susceptible to her own deficiencies in beauty.
Instinctively conscious of how deeply she herself could love, she
believed it impossible that she could ever be so loved in return. The
stranger, so superior in her eyes to all she had yet seen, was the first
who had ever addressed her in that voice which by tones, not words,
speaks that admiration most dear to a woman’s heart. To _him_ she was
beautiful, and her lovely mind spoke out, undimmed by the imperfections
of her face. Not, indeed, that Lucille was wholly without personal
attraction; her light step and graceful form were elastic with the
freshness of youth, and her mouth and smile had so gentle and tender
an expression, that there were moments when it would not have been
the blind only who would have mistaken her to be beautiful. Her early
childhood had indeed given the promise of attractions, which the
smallpox, that then fearful malady, had inexorably marred. It had not
only seared the smooth skin and brilliant hues, but utterly changed even
the character of the features. It so happened that Lucille’s family were
celebrated for beauty, and vain of that celebrity; and so bitterly had
her parents deplored the effects of the cruel malady, that poor Lucille
had been early taught to consider them far more grievous than they
really were, and to exaggerate the advantages of that beauty, the loss
of which was considered by her parents so heavy a misfortune. Lucille,
too, had a cousin named Julie, who was the wonder of all Malines for
her personal perfections; and as the cousins were much together, the
contrast was too striking not to occasion frequent mortification to
Lucille. But every misfortune has something of a counterpoise; and the
consciousness of personal inferiority had meekened, without souring, her
temper, had given gentleness to a spirit that otherwise might have been
too high, and humility to a mind that was naturally strong, impassioned,
and energetic.
And yet Lucille had long conquered the one disadvantage she most dreaded
in the want of beauty. Lucille was never known but to be loved.
Wherever came her presence, her bright and soft mind diffused a certain
inexpressible charm; and where she was not, a something was absent from
the scene which not even Julie’s beauty could replace.
“I propose,” said St. Amand to Madame le Tisseur, Lucille’s mother,
as he sat in her little salon,--for he had already contracted that
acquaintance with the family which permitted him to be led to their
house, to return the visits Madame le Tisseur had made him, and his dog,
once more returned a penitent to his master, always conducted his
steps to the humble abode, and stopped instinctively at the door,--“I
propose,” said St. Amand, after a pause, and with some embarrassment,
“to stay a little while longer at Malines; the air agrees with me, and
I like the quiet of the place; but you are aware, madam, that at a hotel
among strangers, I feel my situation somewhat cheerless. I have been
thinking”--St. Amand paused again--“I have been thinking that if I could
persuade some agreeable family to receive me as a lodger, I would fix
myself here for some weeks. I am easily pleased.”
“Doubtless there are many in Malines who would be too happy to receive
such a lodger.”
“Will you receive me?” asked St. Amand, abruptly. “It was of _your_
family I thought.”
“Of us? Monsieur is too flattering. But we have scarcely a room good
enough for you.”
“What difference between one room and another can there be to me? That
is the best apartment to my choice in which the human voice sounds most
kindly.”
The arrangement was made, and St. Amand came now to reside beneath the
same roof as Lucille. And was she not happy that _he_ wanted so constant
an attendance; was she not happy that she was ever of use? St. Amand was
passionately fond of music; he played himself with a skill that was
only surpassed by the exquisite melody of his voice, and was not Lucille
happy when she sat mute and listening to such sounds as in Malines
were never heard before? Was she not happy in gazing on a face to whose
melancholy aspect her voice instantly summoned the smile? Was she not
happy when the music ceased, and St. Amand called “Lucille”? Did not her
own name uttered by that voice seem to her even sweeter than the music?
Was she not happy when they walked out in the still evenings of summer,
and her arm thrilled beneath the light touch of one to whom she was
so necessary? Was she not proud in her happiness, and was there not
something like worship in the gratitude she felt to him for raising her
humble spirit to the luxury of feeling herself beloved?
St. Amand’s parents were French. They had resided in the neighbourhood
of Amiens, where they had inherited a competent property, to which he
had succeeded about two years previous to the date of my story.
He had been blind from the age of three years. “I know not,” said he,
as he related these particulars to Lucille one evening when they were
alone,--“I know not what the earth may be like, or the heaven, or the
rivers whose voice at least I can hear, for I have no recollection
beyond that of a confused but delicious blending of a thousand glorious
colours, a bright and quick sense of joy, A VISIBLE MUSIC. But it is
only since my childhood closed that I have mourned, as I now unceasingly
mourn, for the light of day. My boyhood passed in a quiet cheerfulness;
the least trifle then could please and occupy the vacancies of my mind;
but it was as I took delight in being read to, as I listened to the
vivid descriptions of Poetry, as I glowed at the recital of great deeds,
as I was made acquainted by books with the energy, the action, the heat,
the fervour, the pomp, the enthusiasm of life, that I gradually opened
to the sense of all I was forever denied. I felt that I existed, not
lived; and that, in the midst of the Universal Liberty, I was sentenced
to a prison, from whose blank walls there was no escape. Still, however,
while my parents lived, I had something of consolation; at least I was
not alone. They died, and a sudden and dread solitude, a vast and empty
dreariness, settled upon my dungeon. One old servant only, who had
attended me from my childhood, who had known me in my short privilege of
light, by whose recollections my mind could grope back its way through
the dark and narrow passages of memory to faint glimpses of the sun,
was all that remained to me of human sympathies. It did not suffice,
however, to content me with a home where my father and my mother’s kind
voice were _not_. A restless impatience, an anxiety to move, possessed
me, and I set out from my home, journeying whither I cared not, so that
at least I could change an air that weighed upon me like a palpable
burden. I took only this old attendant as my companion; he too died
three months since at Bruxelles, worn out with years. Alas! I had
forgotten that he was old, for I saw not his progress to decay; and now,
save my faithless dog, I was utterly alone, till I came hither and found
_thee_.”
Lucille stooped down to caress the dog; she blessed the desertion that
had led him to a friend who never could desert.
But however much, and however gratefully, St. Amand loved Lucille,
her power availed not to chase the melancholy from his brow, and to
reconcile him to his forlorn condition.
“Ah, would that I could see thee! would that I could look upon a face
that my heart vainly endeavours to delineate!”
“If thou couldst,” sighed Lucille, “thou wouldst cease to love me.”
“Impossible!” cried St. Amand, passionately. “However the world may find
thee, _thou_ wouldst become my standard of beauty; and I should judge
not of thee by others, but of others by thee.”
He loved to hear Lucille read to him, and mostly he loved the
descriptions of war, of travel, of wild adventure, and yet they
occasioned him the most pain. Often she paused from the page as she
heard him sigh, and felt that she would even have renounced the bliss of
being loved by him, if she could have restored to him that blessing, the
desire for which haunted him as a spectre.
Lucille’s family were Catholic, and, like most in their station, they
possessed the superstitions, as well as the devotion of the faith.
Sometimes they amused themselves of an evening by the various legends
and imaginary miracles of their calendar; and once, as they were thus
conversing with two or three of their neighbours, “The Tomb of the Three
Kings of Cologne” became the main topic of their wondering recitals.
However strong was the sense of Lucille, she was, as you will readily
conceive, naturally influenced by the belief of those with whom she had
been brought up from her cradle, and she listened to tale after tale
of the miracles wrought at the consecrated tomb, as earnestly and
undoubtingly as the rest.
And the Kings of the East were no ordinary saints; to the relics of
the Three Magi, who followed the Star of Bethlehem, and were the first
potentates of the earth who adored its Saviour, well might the pious
Catholic suppose that a peculiar power and a healing sanctity would
belong. Each of the circle (St. Amand, who had been more than usually
silent, and even gloomy during the day, had retired to his own
apartment, for there were some moments when, in the sadness of his
thoughts, he sought that solitude which he so impatiently fled from at
others)--each of the circle had some story to relate equally veracious
and indisputable, of an infirmity cured, or a prayer accorded, or a sin
atoned for at the foot of the holy tomb. One story peculiarly affected
Lucille; the narrator, a venerable old man with gray locks, solemnly
declared himself a witness of its truth.
A woman at Anvers had given birth to a son, the offspring of an illicit
connection, who came into the world deaf and dumb. The unfortunate
mother believed the calamity a punishment for her own sin. “Ah, would,”
said she, “that the affliction had fallen only upon me! Wretch that I
am, my innocent child is punished for my offence!” This, idea haunted
her night and day; she pined and could not be comforted. As the child
grew up, and wound himself more and more round her heart, his caresses
added new pangs to her remorse; and at length (continued the narrator)
hearing perpetually of the holy fame of the Tomb of Cologne, she
resolved upon a pilgrimage barefoot to the shrine. “God is merciful,”
said she; “and He who called Magdalene his sister may take the mother’s
curse from the child.” She then went to Cologne; she poured her tears,
her penitence, and her prayers at the sacred tomb. When she returned to
her native town, what was her dismay as she approached her cottage to
behold it a heap of ruins! Its blackened rafters and yawning casements
betokened the ravages of fire. The poor woman sank upon the ground
utterly overpowered. Had her son perished? At that moment she heard
the cry of a child’s voice, and, lo! her child rushed to her arms, and
called her “mother!”
He had been saved from the fire, which had broken out seven days before;
but in the terror he had suffered, the string that tied his tongue had
been loosened; he had uttered articulate sounds of distress; the curse
was removed, and one word at least the kind neighbours had already
taught him to welcome his mother’s return. What cared she now that
her substance was gone, that her roof was ashes? She bowed in grateful
submission to so mild a stroke; her prayer had been heard, and the sin
of the mother was visited no longer on the child.
I have said, dear Gertrude, that this story made a deep impression upon
Lucille. A misfortune so nearly akin to that of St. Amand removed by the
prayer of another filled her with devoted thoughts and a beautiful hope.
“Is not the tomb still standing?” thought she. “Is not God still in
heaven?--He who heard the guilty, may He not hear the guiltless? Is He
not the God of love? Are not the affections the offerings that please
Him best? And what though the child’s mediator was his mother, can
even a mother love her child more tenderly than I love Eugene? But if,
Lucille, thy prayer be granted, if he recover his sight, _thy_ charm
is gone, he will love thee no longer. No matter! be it so,--I shall at
least have made him happy!”
Such were the thoughts that filled the mind of Lucille; she cherished
them till they settled into resolution, and she secretly vowed to
perform her pilgrimage of love. She told neither St. Amand nor her
parents of her intention; she knew the obstacles such an announcement
would create. Fortunately she had an aunt settled at Bruxelles, to whom
she had been accustomed once in every year to pay a month’s visit, and
at that time she generally took with her the work of a twelvemonths’
industry, which found a readier sale at Bruxelles than at Malines.
Lucille and St. Amand were already betrothed; their wedding was shortly
to take place; and the custom of the country leading parents, however
poor, to nourish the honourable ambition of giving some dowry with their
daughters, Lucille found it easy to hide the object of her departure,
under the pretence of taking the lace to Bruxelles, which had been the
year’s labour of her mother and herself,--it would sell for sufficient,
at least, to defray the preparations for the wedding.
“Thou art ever right, child,” said Madame le Tisseur; “the richer St.
Amand is, why, the less oughtest thou to go a beggar to his house.”
In fact, the honest ambition of the good people was excited; their pride
had been hurt by the envy of the town and the current congratulations on
so advantageous a marriage; and they employed themselves in counting
up the fortune they should be able to give to their only child, and
flattering their pardonable vanity with the notion that there would
be no such great disproportion in the connection after all. They were
right, but not in their own view of the estimate; the wealth that
Lucille brought was what fate could not lessen, reverse could not reach;
the ungracious seasons could not blight its sweet harvest; imprudence
could not dissipate, fraud could not steal, one grain from its abundant
coffers! Like the purse in the Fairy Tale, its use was hourly, its
treasure inexhaustible.
St. Amand alone was not to be won to her departure; he chafed at the
notion of a dowry; he was not appeased even by Lucille’s representation
that it was only to gratify and not to impoverish her parents. “And
_thou_, too, canst leave me!” he said, in that plaintive voice which had
made his first charm to Lucille’s heart. “It is a double blindness!”
“But for a few days; a fortnight at most, dearest Eugene.”
“A fortnight! you do not reckon time as the blind do,” said St. Amand,
bitterly.
“But listen, listen, dear Eugene,” said Lucille, weeping.
The sound of her sobs restored him to a sense of his ingratitude. Alas,
he knew not how much he had to be grateful for! He held out his arms
to her. “Forgive me,” said he. “Those who can see Nature know not how
terrible it is to be alone.”
“But my mother will not leave you.”
“She is not you!”
“And Julie,” said Lucille, hesitatingly.
“What is Julie to me?”
“Ah, you are the only one, save my parents, who could think of me in her
presence.”
“And why, Lucille?”
“Why! She is more beautiful than a dream.”
“Say not so. Would I could see, that I might prove to the world how much
more beautiful thou art! There is no music in her voice.”
The evening before Lucille departed she sat up late with St. Amand and
her mother. They conversed on the future; they made plans; in the wide
sterility of the world they laid out the garden of household love, and
filled it with flowers, forgetful of the wind that scatters and the
frost that kills. And when, leaning on Lucille’s arm, St. Amand sought
his chamber, and they parted at his door, which closed upon her, she
fell down on her knees at the threshold, and poured out the fulness of
her heart in a prayer for his safety and the fulfilment of her timid
hope.
At daybreak she was consigned to the conveyance that performed the short
journey from Malines to Bruxelles. When she entered the town, instead
of seeking her aunt, she rested at an _auberge_ in the suburbs, and
confiding her little basket of lace to the care of its hostess, she
set out alone, and on foot, upon the errand of her heart’s lovely
superstition. And erring though it was, her faith redeemed its weakness,
her affection made it even sacred; and well may we believe that the Eye
which reads all secrets scarce looked reprovingly on that fanaticism
whose only infirmity was love.
So fearful was she lest, by rendering the task too easy, she might
impair the effect, that she scarcely allowed herself rest or food.
Sometimes, in the heat of noon, she wandered a little from the roadside,
and under the spreading lime-tree surrendered her mind to its sweet and
bitter thoughts; but ever the restlessness of her enterprise urged
her on, and faint, weary, and with bleeding feet, she started up and
continued her way. At length she reached the ancient city, where a
holier age has scarce worn from the habits and aspects of men the Roman
trace. She prostrated herself at the tomb of the Magi; she proffered her
ardent but humble prayer to Him before whose Son those fleshless heads
(yet to faith at least preserved) had, eighteen centuries ago, bowed in
adoration. Twice every day, for a whole week, she sought the same spot,
and poured forth the same prayer. The last day an old priest, who,
hovering in the church, had observed her constantly at devotion, with
that fatherly interest which the better ministers of the Catholic sect
(that sect which has covered the earth with the mansions of charity)
feel for the unhappy, approached her as she was retiring with moist and
downcast eyes, and saluting her, assumed the privilege of his order to
inquire if there was aught in which his advice or aid could serve.
There was something in the venerable air of the old man which encouraged
Lucille; she opened her heart to him; she told him all. The good priest
was much moved by her simplicity and earnestness. He questioned her
minutely as to the peculiar species of blindness with which St. Amand
was afflicted; and after musing a little while, he said, “Daughter,
God is great and merciful; we must trust in His power, but we must
not forget that He mostly works by mortal agents. As you pass through
Louvain in your way home, fail not to see there a certain physician,
named Le Kain. He is celebrated through Flanders for the cures he has
wrought among the blind, and his advice is sought by all classes from
far and near. He lives hard by the Hotel de Ville, but any one will
inform you of his residence. Stay, my child, you shall take him a note
from me; he is a benevolent and kindly man, and you shall tell him
exactly the same story (and with the same voice) you have told to me.”
So saying the priest made Lucille accompany him to his home, and forcing
her to refresh herself less sparingly than she had yet done since she
had left Malines, he gave her his blessing, and a letter to Le Kain,
which he rightly judged would insure her a patient hearing from the
physician. Well known among all men of science was the name of the
priest, and a word of recommendation from him went further, where virtue
and wisdom were honoured, than the longest letter from the haughtiest
sieur in Flanders.
With a patient and hopeful spirit, the young pilgrim turned her back on
the Roman Cologne; and now about to rejoin St. Amand, she felt neither
the heat of the sun nor the weariness of the road. It was one day at
noon that she again passed through Louvain, and she soon found herself
by the noble edifice of the Hotel de Ville. Proud rose its spires
against the sky, and the sun shone bright on its rich tracery and
Gothic casements; the broad open street was crowded with persons of all
classes, and it was with some modest alarm that Lucille lowered her veil
and mingled with the throng. It was easy, as the priest had said, to
find the house of Le Kain; she bade the servant take the priest’s letter
to his master, and she was not long kept waiting before she was admitted
to the physician’s presence. He was a spare, tall man, with a bald
front, and a calm and friendly countenance. He was not less touched
than the priest had been by the manner in which she narrated her
story, described the affliction of her betrothed, and the hope that had
inspired the pilgrimage she had just made.
“Well,” said he, encouragingly, “we must see our patient. You can bring
him hither to me.”
“Ah, sir, I had hoped--” Lucille stopped suddenly.
“What, my young friend?”
“That I might have had the triumph of bringing you to Malines. I know,
sir, what you are about to say, and I know, sir, your time must be very
valuable; but I am not so poor as I seem, and Eugene, that is, M. St.
Amand, is very rich, and--and I have at Bruxelles what I am sure is
a large sum; it was to have provided for the wedding, but it is most
heartily at your service, sir.”
Le Kain smiled; he was one of those men who love to read the human
heart when its leaves are fair and undefiled; and, in the benevolence
of science, he would have gone a longer journey than from Louvain to
Malines to give sight to the blind, even had St. Amand been a beggar.
“Well, well,” said he, “but you forget that M. St. Amand is not the only
one in the world who wants me. I must look at my notebook, and see if I
can be spared for a day or two.”
So saying, he glanced at his memoranda. Everything smiled on Lucille; he
had no engagements that his partner could not fulfil, for some days; he
consented to accompany Lucille to Malines.
Meanwhile, cheerless and dull had passed the time to St. Amand. He was
perpetually asking Madame le Tisseur what hour it was,--it was almost
his only question. There seemed to him no sun in the heavens, no
freshness in the air, and he even forbore his favourite music; the
instrument had lost its sweetness since Lucille was not by to listen.
It was natural that the gossips of Malines should feel some envy at the
marriage Lucille was about to make with one whose competence report had
exaggerated into prodigal wealth, whose birth had been elevated from the
respectable to the noble, and whose handsome person was clothed, by the
interest excited by his misfortune, with the beauty of Antinous. Even
that misfortune, which ought to have levelled all distinctions, was not
sufficient to check the general envy; perhaps to some of the damsels
of Malines blindness in a husband would not have seemed an unwelcome
infirmity! But there was one in whom this envy rankled with a peculiar
sting: it was the beautiful, the all-conquering Julie! That the humble,
the neglected Lucille should be preferred to her; that Lucille, whose
existence was well-nigh forgot beside Julie’s, should become thus
suddenly of importance; that there should be one person in the world,
and that person young, rich, handsome, to whom she was less than
nothing, when weighed in the balance with Lucille, mortified to the
quick a vanity that had never till then received a wound. “It is well,”
she would say with a bitter jest, “that Lucille’s lover is blind. To be
the one it is necessary to be the other!”
During Lucille’s absence she had been constantly in Madame le Tisseur’s
house; indeed, Lucille had prayed her to be so. She had sought, with an
industry that astonished herself, to supply Lucille’s place; and among
the strange contradictions of human nature, she had learned during her
efforts to please, to love the object of those efforts,--as much at
least as she was capable of loving.
She conceived a positive hatred to Lucille; she persisted in imagining
that nothing but the accident of first acquaintance had deprived her
of a conquest with which she persuaded herself her happiness had become
connected. Had St. Amand never loved Lucille and proposed to Julie, his
misfortune would have made her reject him, despite his wealth and his
youth; but to be Lucille’s lover, and a conquest to be won from Lucille,
raised him instantly to an importance not his own. Safe, however, in his
affliction, the arts and beauty of Julie fell harmless on the fidelity
of St. Amand. Nay, he liked her less than ever, for it seemed an
impertinence in any one to counterfeit the anxiety and watchfulness of
Lucille.
“It is time, surely it is time, Madame le Tisseur, that Lucille should
return? She might have sold all the lace in Malines by this time,” said
St. Amand, one day, peevishly.
“Patience, my dear friend, patience; perhaps she may return to-morrow.”
“To-morrow! let me see, it is only six o’clock,--only six, you are
sure?”
“Just five, dear Eugene. Shall I read to you? This is a new book from
Paris; it has made a great noise,” said Julie.
“You are very kind, but I will not trouble you.”
“It is anything but trouble.”
“In a word, then, I would rather not.”
“Oh, that he could see!” thought Julie; “would I not punish him for
this!”
“I hear carriage wheels; who can be passing this way? Surely it is the
_voiturier_ from Bruxelles,” said St. Amand, starting up; “it is his
day,--his hour, too. No, no, it is a lighter vehicle,” and he sank down
listlessly on his seat.
Nearer and nearer rolled the wheels; they turned the corner; they
stopped at the lowly door; and, overcome, overjoyed, Lucille was clasped
to the bosom of St. Amand.
“Stay,” said she, blushing, as she recovered her self-possession, and
turned to Le Kain; “pray pardon me, sir. Dear Eugene, I have brought
with me one who, by God’s blessing, may yet restore you to sight.”
“We must not be sanguine, my child,” said Le Kain; “anything is better
than disappointment.”
To close this part of my story, dear Gertrude, Le Kain examined St.
Amand, and the result of the examination was a confident belief in the
probability of a cure. St. Amand gladly consented to the experiment of
an operation; it succeeded, the blind man saw! Oh, what were Lucille’s
feelings, what her emotion, what her joy, when she found the object of
her pilgrimage, of her prayers, fulfilled! That joy was so intense that
in the eternal alternations of human life she might have foretold from
its excess how bitter the sorrows fated to ensue.
As soon as by degrees the patient’s new sense became reconciled to the
light, his first, his only demand was for Lucille. “No, let me not see
her alone; let me see her in the midst of you all, that I may convince
you that the heart never is mistaken in its instincts.” With a fearful,
a sinking presentiment, Lucille yielded to the request, to which the
impetuous St. Amand would hear indeed no denial. The father, the
mother, Julie, Lucille, Julie’s younger sisters, assembled in the
little parlour; the door opened, and St. Amand stood hesitating on the
threshold. One look around sufficed to him; his face brightened, he
uttered a cry of joy. “Lucille! Lucille!” he exclaimed, “it is you, I
know it, _you_ only!” He sprang forward _and fell at the feet of Julie_!
Flushed, elated, triumphant, Julie bent upon him her sparkling eyes;
_she_ did not undeceive him.
“You are wrong, you mistake,” said Madame le Tisseur, in confusion;
“that is her cousin Julie,--this is your Lucille.”
St. Amand rose, turned, saw Lucille, and at that moment she wished
herself in her grave. Surprise, mortification, disappointment, almost
dismay, were depicted in his gaze. He had been haunting his prison-house
with dreams, and now, set free, he felt how unlike they were to the
truth. Too new to observation to read the woe, the despair, the lapse
and shrinking of the whole frame, that his look occasioned Lucille, he
yet felt, when the first shock of his surprise was over, that it was not
thus he should thank her who had restored him to sight. He hastened to
redeem his error--ah! how could it be redeemed?
From that hour all Lucille’s happiness was at an end; her fairy palace
was shattered in the dust; the magician’s wand was broken up; the
Ariel was given to the winds; and the bright enchantment no longer
distinguished the land she lived in from the rest of the barren
world. It is true that St. Amand’s words were kind; it is true that he
remembered with the deepest gratitude all she had done in his behalf;
it is true that he forced himself again and again to say, “She is my
betrothed, my benefactress!” and he cursed himself to think that the
feelings he had entertained for her were fled. Where was the passion of
his words; where the ardour of his tone; where that play and light of
countenance which her step, her voice, could formerly call forth? When
they were alone he was embarrassed and constrained, and almost cold;
his hand no longer sought hers, his soul no longer missed her if she was
absent a moment from his side. When in their household circle he seemed
visibly more at ease; but did his eyes fasten upon her who had opened
them to the day; did they not wander at every interval with a too
eloquent admiration to the blushing and radiant face of the exulting
Julie? This was not, you will believe, suddenly perceptible in one
day or one week, but every day it was perceptible more and more. Yet
still--bewitched, ensnared, as St. Amand was he never perhaps would have
been guilty of an infidelity that he strove with the keenest remorse to
wrestle against, had it not been for the fatal contrast, at the first
moment of his gushing enthusiasm, which Julie had presented to Lucille;
but for that he would have formed no previous idea of real and living
beauty to aid the disappointment of his imaginings and his dreams.
He would have seen Lucille young and graceful, and with eyes beaming
affection, contrasted only by the wrinkled countenance and bended frame
of her parents, and she would have completed her conquest over him
before he had discovered that she was less beautiful than others; nay,
more,--that infidelity never could have lasted above the first few days,
if the vain and heartless object of it had not exerted every art, all
the power and witchery of her beauty, to cement and continue it. The
unfortunate Lucille--so susceptible to the slightest change in those
she loved, so diffident of herself, so proud too in that diffidence--no
longer necessary, no longer missed, no longer loved, could not bear to
endure the galling comparison between the past and the present. She
fled uncomplainingly to her chamber to indulge her tears, and thus,
unhappily, absent as her father generally was during the day, and busied
as her mother was either at work or in household matters, she left Julie
a thousand opportunities to complete the power she had begun to wield
over--no, not the heart!--the _senses_ of St. Amand! Yet, still not
suspecting, in the open generosity of her mind, the whole extent of her
affliction, poor Lucille buoyed herself at times with the hope that when
once married, when, once in that intimacy of friendship, the unspeakable
love she felt for him could disclose itself with less restraint than at
present,--she would perhaps regain a heart which had been so devotedly
hers, that she could not think that without a fault it was irrevocably
gone: on that hope she anchored all the little happiness that remained
to her. And still St. Amand pressed their marriage, but in what
different tones! In fact, he wished to preclude from himself the
possibility of a deeper ingratitude than that which he had incurred
already. He vainly thought that the broken reed of love might be bound
up and strengthened by the ties of duty; and at least he was anxious
that his hand, his fortune, his esteem, his gratitude, should give
to Lucille the only recompense it was now in his power to bestow.
Meanwhile, left alone so often with Julie, and Julie bent on achieving
the last triumph over his heart, St. Amand was gradually preparing a
far different reward, a far different return, for her to whom he owed so
incalculable a debt.
There was a garden, behind the house, in which there was a small
arbour, where often in the summer evenings Eugene and Lucille had
sat together,--hours never to return! One day she heard from her own
chamber, where she sat mourning, the sound of St. Amand’s flute swelling
gently from that beloved and consecrated bower. She wept as she heard
it, and the memories that the music bore softening and endearing his
image, she began to reproach herself that she had yielded so often to
the impulse of her wounded feelings; that chilled by _his_ coldness, she
had left him so often to himself, and had not sufficiently dared to
tell him of that affection which, in her modest self-depreciation,
constituted her only pretension to his love. “Perhaps he is alone now,”
she thought; “the air too is one which he knows that I love;” and with
her heart in her step, she stole from the house and sought the arbour.
She had scarce turned from her chamber when the flute ceased; as she
neared the arbour she heard voices,--Julie’s voice in grief, St. Amand’s
in consolation. A dread foreboding seized her; her feet clung rooted to
the earth.
“Yes, marry her, forget me,” said Julie; “in a few days you will
be another’s, and I--I--forgive me, Eugene, forgive me that I have
disturbed your happiness. I am punished sufficiently; my heart will
break, but it will break in loving you.” Sobs choked Julie’s voice.
“Oh, speak not thus,” said St. Amand. “I, _I_ only am to blame,--I,
false to both, to both ungrateful. Oh, from the hour that these eyes
opened upon you I drank in a new life; the sun itself to me was less
wonderful than your beauty. But--but--let me forget that hour. What do I
not owe to Lucille? I shall be wretched,--I shall deserve to be so;
for shall I not think, Julie, that I have embittered your life with our
ill-fated love? But all that I can give--my hand, my home, my plighted
faith--must be hers. Nay, Julie, nay--why that look? Could I act
otherwise? Can I dream otherwise? Whatever the sacrifice, _must_ I not
render it? Ah, what do I owe to Lucille, were it only for the thought
that but for her I might never have seen thee!”
Lucille stayed to hear no more; with the same soft step as that which
had borne her within hearing of these fatal words, she turned back once
more to her desolate chamber.
That evening, as St. Amand was sitting alone in his apartment, he heard
a gentle knock at the door. “Come in,” he said, and Lucille entered. He
started in some confusion, and would have taken her hand, but she gently
repulsed him. She took a seat opposite to him, and looking down, thus
addressed him:--
“My dear Eugene, that is, Monsieur St. Amand, I have something on my
mind that I think it better to speak at once; and if I do not exactly
express what I would wish to say, you must not be offended with Lucille:
it is not an easy matter to put into words what one feels deeply.”
Colouring, and suspecting something of the truth, St. Amand would have
broken in upon her here; but she with a gentle impatience motioned him
to be silent, and continued:--
“You know that when you once loved me, I used to tell you that you would
cease to do so could you see how undeserving I was of your attachment. I
did not deceive myself, Eugene; I always felt assured that such would be
the case, that your love for me necessarily rested on your affliction.
But for all that I never at least had a dream or a desire but for your
happiness; and God knows, that if again, by walking barefooted, not to
Cologne, but to Rome--to the end of the world--I could save you from a
much less misfortune than that of blindness, I would cheerfully do it;
yes, even though I might foretell all the while that, on my return, you
would speak to me coldly, think of me lightly, and that the penalty to
me would--would be--what it has been!” Here Lucille wiped a few natural
tears from her eyes. St. Amand, struck to the heart, covered his
face with his hands, without the courage to interrupt her. Lucille
continued:--
“That which I foresaw has come to pass; I am no longer to you what I
once was, when you could clothe this poor form and this homely face with
a beauty they did not possess. You would wed me still, it is true; but I
am proud, Eugene, and cannot stoop to gratitude where I once had love.
I am not so unjust as to blame you; the change was natural, was
inevitable. I should have steeled myself more against it; but I am now
resigned. We must part; you love Julie--that too is natural--and _she_
loves you; ah! what also more in the probable course of events? Julie
loves you, not yet, perhaps, so much as I did; but then she has not
known you as I have, and she whose whole life has been triumph cannot
feel the gratitude that I felt at fancying myself loved; but this will
come--God grant it! Farewell, then, forever, dear Eugene; I leave you
when you no longer want me; you are now independent of Lucille; wherever
you go, a thousand hereafter can supply my place. Farewell!”
She rose, as she said this, to leave the room; but St. Amand seizing her
hand, which she in vain endeavoured to withdraw from his clasp, poured
forth incoherently, passionately, his reproaches on himself, his
eloquent persuasion against her resolution.
“I confess,” said he, “that I have been allured for a moment; I confess
that Julie’s beauty made me less sensible to your stronger, your holier,
oh! far, far holier title to my love! But forgive me, dearest Lucille;
already I return to you, to all I once felt for you; make me not curse
the blessing of sight that I owe to you. You must not leave me; never
can we two part. Try me, only try me, and if ever hereafter my heart
wander from you, _then_, Lucille, leave me to my remorse!”
Even at that moment Lucille did not yield; she felt that his prayer was
but the enthusiasm of the hour; she felt that there was a virtue in her
pride,--that to leave him was a duty to herself. In vain he pleaded; in
vain were his embraces, his prayers; in vain he reminded her of their
plighted troth, of her aged parents, whose happiness had become wrapped
in her union with him: “How,--even were it as you wrongly believe,--how,
in honour to them, can I desert you, can I wed another?”
“Trust that, trust all, to me,” answered Lucille; “your honour shall
be my care, none shall blame _you_; only do not let your marriage with
Julie be celebrated here before their eyes: that is all I ask, all they
can expect. God bless you! do not fancy I shall be unhappy, for whatever
happiness the world gives you, shall I not have contributed to bestow
it? and with that thought I am above compassion.”
She glided from his arms, and left him to a solitude more bitter even
than that of blindness. That very night Lucille sought her mother; to
her she confided all. I pass over the reasons she urged, the arguments
she overcame; she conquered rather than convinced, and leaving to Madame
le Tisseur the painful task of breaking to her father her unalterable
resolution, she quitted Malines the next morning, and with a heart too
honest to be utterly without comfort, paid that visit to her aunt which
had been so long deferred.
The pride of Lucille’s parents prevented them from reproaching St.
Amand. He could not bear, however, their cold and altered looks; he left
their house; and though for several days he would not even see Julie,
yet her beauty and her art gradually resumed their empire over him. They
were married at Courtroi, and to the joy of the vain Julie departed to
the gay metropolis of France. But, before their departure, before his
marriage, St. Amand endeavoured to appease his conscience by obtaining
for M. le Tisseur a much more lucrative and honourable office than that
he now held. Rightly judging that Malines could no longer be a pleasant
residence for them, and much less for Lucille, the duties of the post
were to be fulfilled in another town; and knowing that M. le Tisseur’s
delicacy would revolt at receiving such a favour from his hands, he kept
the nature of his negotiation a close secret, and suffered the honest
citizen to believe that his own merits alone had entitled him to so
unexpected a promotion.
Time went on. This quiet and simple history of humble affections took
its date in a stormy epoch of the world,--the dawning Revolution of
France. The family of Lucille had been little more than a year settled
in their new residence when Dumouriez led his army into the Netherlands.
But how meanwhile had that year passed for Lucille? I have said that her
spirit was naturally high; that though so tender, she was not weak. Her
very pilgrimage to Cologne alone, and at the timid age of seventeen,
proved that there was a strength in her nature no less than a devotion
in her love. The sacrifice she had made brought its own reward.
She believed St. Amand was happy, and she would not give way to the
selfishness of grief; she had still duties to perform; she could still
comfort her parents and cheer their age; she could still be all the
world to them: she felt this, and was consoled. Only once during the
year had she heard of Julie; she had been seen by a mutual friend at
Paris, gay, brilliant, courted, and admired; of St. Amand she heard
nothing.
My tale, dear Gertrude, does not lead me through the harsh scenes of
war. I do not tell you of the slaughter and the siege, and the blood
that inundated those fair lands,--the great battlefield of Europe. The
people of the Netherlands in general were with the cause of Dumouriez,
but the town in which Le Tisseur dwelt offered some faint resistance to
his arms. Le Tisseur himself, despite his age, girded on his sword; the
town was carried, and the fierce and licentious troops of the conqueror
poured, flushed with their easy victory, through its streets. Le
Tisseur’s house was filled with drunken and rude troopers; Lucille
herself trembled in the fierce gripe of one of those dissolute soldiers,
more bandit than soldier, whom the subtle Dumouriez had united to his
army, and by whose blood he so often saved that of his nobler band. Her
shrieks, her cries, were vain, when suddenly the troopers gave way. “The
Captain! brave Captain!” was shouted forth; the insolent soldier, felled
by a powerful arm, sank senseless at the feet of Lucille, and a glorious
form, towering above its fellows,--even through its glittering garb,
even in that dreadful hour, remembered at a glance by Lucille,--stood
at her side; her protector, her guardian! Thus once more she beheld St.
Amand!
The house was cleared in an instant, the door barred. Shouts, groans,
wild snatches of exulting song, the clang of arms, the tramp of horses,
the hurrying footsteps, the deep music sounded loud, and blended
terribly without. Lucille heard them not,--she was on that breast which
never should have deserted her.
Effectually to protect his friends, St. Amand took up his quarters at
their house; and for two days he was once more under the same roof as
Lucille. He never recurred voluntarily to Julie; he answered Lucille’s
timid inquiry after her health briefly, and with coldness, but he spoke
with all the enthusiasm of a long-pent and ardent spirit of the new
profession he had embraced. Glory seemed now to be his only mistress;
and the vivid delusion of the first bright dreams of the Revolution
filled his mind, broke from his tongue, and lighted up those dark eyes
which Lucille had redeemed to day.
She saw him depart at the head of his troops; she saw his proud crest
glancing in the sun; she saw his steed winding through the narrow
street; she saw that his last glance reverted to her, where she stood at
the door; and, as he waved his adieu, she fancied that there was on his
face that look of deep and grateful tenderness which reminded her of the
one bright epoch of her life.
She was right; St. Amand had long since in bitterness repented of a
transient infatuation, had long since distinguished the true Florimel
from the false, and felt that, in Julie, Lucille’s wrongs were avenged.
But in the hurry and heat of war he plunged that regret--the keenest of
all--which embodies the bitter words, “TOO LATE!”
Years passed away, and in the resumed tranquillity of Lucille’s life the
brilliant apparition of St. Amand appeared as something dreamed of, not
seen. The star of Napoleon had risen above the horizon; the romance of
his early career had commenced; and the campaign of Egypt had been the
herald of those brilliant and meteoric successes which flashed forth
from the gloom of the Revolution of France.
You are aware, dear Gertrude, how many in the French as well as the
English troops returned home from Egypt blinded with the ophthalmia of
that arid soil. Some of the young men in Lucille’s town, who had joined
Napoleon’s army, came back darkened by that fearful affliction, and
Lucille’s alms and Lucille’s aid and Lucille’s sweet voice were ever
at hand for those poor sufferers, whose common misfortune touched so
thrilling a chord of her heart.
Her father was now dead, and she had only her mother to cheer amidst the
ills of age. As one evening they sat at work together, Madame le Tisseur
said, after a pause,--
“I wish, dear Lucille, thou couldst be persuaded to marry Justin; he
loves thee well, and now that thou art yet young, and hast many years
before thee, thou shouldst remember that when I die thou wilt be alone.”
“Ah, cease, dearest mother, I never can marry now; and as for love--once
taught in the bitter school in which I have learned the knowledge of
myself--I cannot be deceived again.”
“My Lucille, you do not know yourself. Never was woman loved if Justin
does not love you; and never did lover feel with more real warmth how
worthily he loved.”
And this was true; and not of Justin alone, for Lucille’s modest
virtues, her kindly temper, and a certain undulating and feminine grace,
which accompanied all her movements, had secured her as many conquests
as if she had been beautiful. She had rejected all offers of marriage
with a shudder; without even the throb of a flattered vanity. One
memory, sadder, was also dearer to her than all things; and something
sacred in its recollections made her deem it even a crime to think of
effacing the past by a new affection.
“I believe,” continued Madame le Tisseur, angrily, “that thou still
thinkest fondly of him from whom only in the world thou couldst have
experienced ingratitude.”
“Nay, Mother,” said Lucille, with a blush and a slight sigh, “Eugene is
married to another.”
While thus conversing, they heard a gentle and timid knock at the door;
the latch was lifted. “This,” said the rough voice of a _commissionaire_
of the town, “this, monsieur, is the house of Madame le Tisseur, and
_voila mademoiselle_!” A tall figure, with a shade over his eyes, and
wrapped in a long military cloak, stood in the room. A thrill shot
across Lucille’s heart. He stretched out his arms. “Lucille,” said that
melancholy voice, which had made the music of her first youth, “where
art thou, Lucille? Alas! she does not recognize St. Amand.”
Thus was it indeed. By a singular fatality, the burning suns and the
sharp dust of the plains of Egypt had smitten the young soldier, in
the flush of his career, with a second--and this time with an
irremediable--blindness! He had returned to France to find his hearth
lonely. Julie was no more,--a sudden fever had cut her off in the midst
of youth; and he had sought his way to Lucille’s house, to see if one
hope yet remained to him in the world!
And when, days afterwards, humbly and sadly he re-urged a former suit,
did Lucille shut her heart to its prayer? Did her pride remember its
wound; did she revert to his desertion; did she reply to the whisper of
her yearning love, “_Thou hast been before forsaken_”? That voice and
those darkened eyes pleaded to her with a pathos not to be resisted. “I
am once more necessary to him,” was all her thought; “if I reject him
who will tend him?” In that thought was the motive of her conduct; in
that thought gushed back upon her soul all the springs of checked but
unconquered, unconquerable love! In that thought, she stood beside him
at the altar, and pledged, with a yet holier devotion than she might
have felt of yore, the vow of her imperishable truth.
And Lucille found, in the future, a reward, which the common world could
never comprehend. With his blindness returned all the feelings she had
first awakened in St. Amand’s solitary heart; again he yearned for her
step, again he missed even a moment’s absence from his side, again her
voice chased the shadow from his brow, and in her presence was a sense
of shelter and of sunshine. He no longer sighed for the blessing he had
lost; he reconciled himself to fate, and entered into that serenity of
mood which mostly characterizes the blind.
Perhaps after we have seen the actual world, and experienced its hollow
pleasures, we can resign ourselves the better to its exclusion; and
as the cloister, which repels the ardour of our hope, is sweet to
our remembrance, so the darkness loses its terror when experience has
wearied us with the glare and travail of the day. It was something, too,
as they advanced in life, to feel the chains that bound him to Lucille
strengthening daily, and to cherish in his overflowing heart the
sweetness of increasing gratitude; it was something that he could not
see years wrinkle that open brow, or dim the tenderness of that touching
smile; it was something that to him she was beyond the reach of time,
and preserved to the verge of a grave (which received them both within
a few days of each other) in all the bloom of her unwithering affection,
in all the freshness of a heart that never could grow old!
Gertrude, who had broken in upon Trevylyan’s story by a thousand anxious
interruptions, and a thousand pretty apologies for interrupting, was
charmed with a tale in which true love was made happy at last, although
she did not forgive St. Amand his ingratitude, and although she
declared, with a critical shake of the head, that “it was very unnatural
that the mere beauty of Julie, or the mere want of it in Lucille, should
have produced such an effect upon him, if he had ever _really_ loved
Lucille in his blindness.”
As they passed through Malines, the town assumed an interest in
Gertrude’s eyes to which it scarcely of itself was entitled. She looked
wistfully at the broad market-place, at a corner of which was one of
those out-of-door groups of quiet and noiseless revellers, which Dutch
art has raised from the Familiar to the Picturesque; and then glancing
to the tower of St. Rembauld, she fancied, amidst the silence of noon,
that she yet heard the plaintive cry of the blind orphan, “Fido, Fido,
why hast thou deserted me?”
CHAPTER V. ROTTERDAM.--THE CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH.--THEIR RESEMBLANCE TO
THE GERMANS.--A DISPUTE BETWEEN VANE AND TREVYLYAN, AFTER THE MANNER OF
THE ANCIENT NOVELISTS, AS TO WHICH IS PREFERABLE, THE LIFE OF ACTION OR
THE LIFE OF REPOSE.--TREVYLYAN’S CONTRAST BETWEEN LITERARY AMBITION AND
THE AMBITION OF PUBLIC LIFE.
OUR travellers arrived at Rotterdam on a bright and sunny day. There is
a cheerfulness about the operations of Commerce,--a life, a bustle,
an action which always exhilarate the spirits at the first glance.
Afterwards they fatigue us; we get too soon behind the scenes, and find
the base and troublous passions which move the puppets and conduct the
drama.
But Gertrude, in whom ill health had not destroyed the vividness of
impression that belongs to the inexperienced, was delighted at the
cheeriness of all around her. As she leaned lightly on Trevylyan’s arm,
he listened with a forgetful joy to her questions and exclamations
at the stir and liveliness of a city from which was to commence their
pilgrimage along the Rhine. And indeed the scene was rife with the
spirit of that people at once so active and so patient, so daring on
the sea, so cautious on the land. Industry was visible everywhere; the
vessels in the harbour, the crowded boat putting off to land, the
throng on the quay,--all looked bustling and spoke of commerce. The city
itself, on which the skies shone fairly through light and fleecy clouds,
wore a cheerful aspect. The church of St. Lawrence rising above the
clean, neat houses, and on one side trees thickly grouped, gayly
contrasted at once the waters and the city.
“I like this place,” said Gertrude’s father, quietly; “it has an air of
comfort.”
“And an absence of grandeur,” said Trevylyan.
“A commercial people are one great middle-class in their habits and
train of mind,” replied Vane; “and grandeur belongs to the extremes,--an
impoverished population and a wealthy despot.”
They went to see the statue of Erasmus, and the house in which he was
born. Vane had a certain admiration for Erasmus which his companions did
not share; he liked the quiet irony of the sage, and his knowledge of
the world; and, besides, Vane was at that time of life when philosophers
become objects of interest. At first they are teachers; secondly,
friends; and it is only a few who arrive at the third stage, and find
them deceivers. The Dutch are a singular people. Their literature
is neglected, but it has some of the German vein in its strata,--the
patience, the learning, the homely delineation, and even some traces of
the mixture of the humorous and the terrible which form that genius for
the grotesque so especially German--you find this in their legends and
ghost-stories. But in Holland activity destroys, in Germany indolence
nourishes, romance.
They stayed a day or two at Rotterdam, and then proceeded up the Rhine
to Gorcum. The banks were flat and tame, and nothing could be less
impressive of its native majesty than this part of the course of the
great river.
“I never felt before,” whispered Gertrude, tenderly, “how much there
was of consolation in your presence; for here I am at last on the
Rhine,--the blue Rhine, and how disappointed I should be if you were not
by my side!”
“But, my Gertrude, you must wait till we have passed Cologne, before the
_glories_ of the Rhine burst upon you.”
“It reverses life, my child,” said the moralizing Vane; “and the
stream flows through dulness at first, reserving its poetry for our
perseverance.”
“I will not allow your doctrine,” said Trevylyan, as the ambitious
ardour of his native disposition stirred within him. “Life has
always action; it is our own fault if it ever be dull: youth has its
enterprise, manhood its schemes; and even if infirmity creep upon age,
the mind, the mind still triumphs over the mortal clay, and in the quiet
hermitage, among books, and from thoughts, keeps the great wheel within
everlastingly in motion. No, the better class of spirits have always an
antidote to the insipidity of a common career, they have ever energy at
will--”
“And never happiness!” answered Vane, after a pause, as he gazed on the
proud countenance of Trevylyan, with that kind of calm, half-pitying
interest which belonged to a character deeply imbued with the philosophy
of a sad experience acting upon an unimpassioned heart. “And in truth,
Trevylyan, it would please me if I could but teach you the folly of
preferring the exercise of that energy of which you speak to the golden
luxuries of REST. What ambition can ever bring an adequate reward? Not,
surely, the ambition of letters, the desire of intellectual renown!”
“True,” said Trevylyan, quietly; “that dream I have long renounced;
there is nothing palpable in literary fame,--it scarcely perhaps soothes
the vain, it assuredly chafes the proud. In my earlier years I attempted
some works which gained what the world, perhaps rightly, deemed a
sufficient need of reputation; yet it was not sufficient to recompense
myself for the fresh hours I had consumed, for the sacrifices of
pleasure I had made. The subtle aims that had inspired me were not
perceived; the thoughts that had seemed new and beautiful to me fell
flat and lustreless on the soul of others. If I was approved, it
was often for what I condemned myself; and I found that the trite
commonplace and the false wit charmed, while the truth fatigued, and
the enthusiasm revolted. For men of that genius to which I make no
pretension, who have dwelt apart in the obscurity of their own thoughts,
gazing upon stars that shine not for the dull sleepers of the world, it
must be a keen sting to find the product of their labour confounded
with a class, and to be mingled up in men’s judgment with the faults
or merits of a tribe. Every great genius must deem himself original
and alone in his conceptions. It is not enough for him that these
conceptions should be approved as good, unless they are admitted as
inventive, if they mix him with the herd he has shunned, not separate
him in fame as he has been separated in soul. Some Frenchman, the oracle
of his circle, said of the poet of the ‘Phedre,’ ‘Racine and the other
imitators of Corneille;’ and Racine, in his wrath, nearly forswore
tragedy forever. It is in vain to tell the author that the public is the
judge of his works. The author believes himself above the public, or he
would never have written; and,” continued Trevylyan, with enthusiasm,
“he _is_ above them; their fiat may crush his glory, but never his
self-esteem. He stands alone and haughty amidst the wrecks of the temple
he imagined he had raised ‘To THE FUTURE,’ and retaliates neglect with
scorn. But is this, the life of scorn, a pleasurable state of existence?
Is it one to be cherished? Does even the moment of fame counterbalance
the years of mortification? And what is there in literary fame itself
present and palpable to its heir? His work is a pebble thrown into
the deep; the stir lasts for a moment, and the wave closes up, to be
susceptible no more to the same impression. The circle may widen to
other lands and other ages, but around _him_ it is weak and faint. The
trifles of the day, the low politics, the base intrigues, occupy the
tongue, and fill the thought of his contemporaries. He is less known
than a mountebank, or a new dancer; his glory comes not home to him; it
brings no present, no perpetual reward, like the applauses that wait the
actor, or the actor-like murmur of the senate; and this, which vexes,
also lowers him; his noble nature begins to nourish the base vices of
jealousy, and the unwillingness to admire. Goldsmith is forgotten in the
presence of a puppet; he feels it, and is mean; he expresses it, and
is ludicrous. It is well to say that great minds will not stoop to
jealousy; in the greatest minds, it is most frequent.* Few authors are
ever so aware of the admiration they excite as to afford to be generous;
and this melancholy truth revolts us with our own ambition. Shall we be
demigods in our closets at the price of sinking below mortality in the
world? No! it was from this deep sentiment of the unrealness of literary
fame, of dissatisfaction at the fruits it produced, of fear for the
meanness it engendered, that I resigned betimes all love for its career;
and if, by the restless desire that haunts men who think much to write
ever, I should be urged hereafter to literature, I will sternly teach
myself to persevere in the indifference to its fame.”
* See the long list of names furnished by Disraeli, in that most
exquisite work, “The Literary Character,” vol. ii. p. 75. Plato,
Xenophon, Chaucer, Corneille, Voltaire, Dryden, the Caracci,
Domenico Venetiano, murdered by his envious friend, and the gentle
Castillo fainting away at the genius of Murillo.
“You say as I would say,” answered Vane, with his tranquil smile; “and
your experience corroborates my theory. Ambition, then, is not the root
of happiness. Why more in action than in letters?”
“Because,” said Trevylyan, “in action we commonly gain in our life all
the honour we deserve: the public judge of men better and more rapidly
than of books. And he who takes to himself in action a high and pure
ambition, associates it with so many objects, that, unlike literature,
the failure of one is balanced by the success of the other. He, the
creator of deeds, not resembling the creator of books, stands not alone;
he is eminently social; he has many comrades, and without their aid
he could not accomplish his designs. This divides and mitigates the
impatient jealousy against others. He works for a cause, and knows early
that he cannot monopolize its whole glory; he shares what he is aware
it is impossible to engross. Besides, action leaves him no time for
brooding over disappointment. The author has consumed his youth in a
work,--it fails in glory. Can he write another work? Bid him call back
another youth! But in action, the labour of the mind is from day to day.
A week replaces what a week has lost, and all the aspirant’s fame is of
the present. It is lipped by the Babel of the living world; he is
ever on the stage, and the spectators are ever ready to applaud. Thus
perpetually in the service of others self ceases to be his world; he has
no leisure to brood over real or imaginary wrongs; the excitement whirls
on the machine till it is worn out--”
“And kicked aside,” said Vane, “with the broken lumber of men’s other
tools, in the chamber of their son’s forgetfulness. Your man of action
lasts but for an hour; the man of letters lasts for ages.”
“We live not for ages,” answered Trevylyan; “our life is on earth, and
not in the grave.”
“But even grant,” continued Vane--“and I for one will concede the
point--that posthumous fame is not worth the living agonies that obtain
it, how are you better off in your poor and vulgar career of action?
Would you assist the rulers?--servility! The people?--folly! If you take
the great philosophical view which the worshippers of the past rarely
take, but which, unknown to them, is their sole excuse,--namely, that
the changes which _may_ benefit the future unsettle the present; and
that it is not the wisdom of practical legislation to risk the peace
of our contemporaries in the hope of obtaining happiness for their
posterity,--to what suspicions, to what charges are you exposed! You are
deemed the foe of all liberal opinion, and you read your curses in the
eyes of a nation. But take the side of the people. What caprice, what
ingratitude! You have professed so much in theory, that you can never
accomplish sufficient in practice. Moderation becomes a crime; to be
prudent is to be perfidious. New demagogues, without temperance, because
without principle, outstrip you in the moment of your greatest services.
The public is the grave of a great man’s deeds; it is never sated; its
maw is eternally open; it perpetually craves for more. Where, in the
history of the world, do you find the gratitude of a people? You find
fervour, it is true, but not gratitude,--the fervour that exaggerates a
benefit at one moment, but not the gratitude that remembers it the next
year. Once disappoint them, and all your actions, all your sacrifices,
are swept from their remembrance forever; they break the windows of the
very house they have given you, and melt down their medals into bullets.
Who serves man, ruler or peasant, serves the ungrateful; and all the
ambitious are but types of a Wolsey or a De Witt.”
“And what,” said Trevylyan, “consoles a man in the ills that flesh is
heir to, in that state of obscure repose, that serene inactivity to
which you would confine him? Is it not his conscience? Is it not his
self-acquittal, or his self-approval?”
“Doubtless,” replied Vane.
“Be it so,” answered the high-souled Trevylyan; “the same consolation
awaits us in action as in repose. We sedulously pursue what we deem to
be true glory. We are maligned; but our soul acquits us. Could it do
more in the scandal and the prejudice that assail us in private life?
You are silent; but note how much deeper should be the comfort, how much
loftier the self-esteem; for if calumny attack us in a wilful obscurity,
what have we done to refute the calumny? How have we served our species?
Have we ‘scorned delight and loved laborious days’? Have we made the
utmost of the ‘talent’ confided to our care? Have we done those
good deeds to our race upon which we can retire,--an ‘Estate of
Beneficence,’--from the malice of the world, and feel that our deeds
are our defenders? This is the consolation of virtuous actions; is it so
of--even a virtuous--indolence?”
“You speak as a preacher,” said Vane,--“I merely as a calculator; you of
virtue in affliction, I of a life in ease.”
“Well, then, if the consciousness of perpetual endeavour to advance our
race be not alone happier than the life of ease, let us see what this
vaunted ease really is. Tell me, is it not another name for _ennui_?
This state of quiescence, this objectless, dreamless torpor, this
transition _du lit a la table, de la table au lit_,--what more dreary
and monotonous existence can you devise? Is it pleasure in this
inglorious existence to think that you are serving pleasure? Is it
freedom to be the slave to self? For I hold,” continued Trevylyan,
“that this jargon of ‘consulting happiness,’ this cant of living for
ourselves, is but a mean as well as a false philosophy. Why this eternal
reference to self? Is self alone to be consulted? Is even our happiness,
did it truly consist in repose, really the great end of life? I doubt if
we cannot ascend higher. I doubt if we cannot say with a great moralist,
‘If virtue be not estimable in itself, we can see nothing estimable in
following it for the sake of a bargain.’ But, in fact, repose is the
poorest of all delusions; the very act of recurring to self brings about
us all those ills of self from which, in the turmoil of the world, we
can escape. We become hypochondriacs. Our very health grows an object
of painful possession. We are so desirous to be well (for what is
retirement without health?) that we are ever fancying ourselves ill;
and, like the man in the ‘Spectator,’ we weigh ourselves daily, and live
but by grains and scruples. Retirement is happy only for the poet, for
to him it is _not_ retirement. He secedes from one world but to gain
another, and he finds not _ennui_ in seclusion: why? Not because
seclusion hath _repose_, but because it hath _occupation_. In one word,
then, I say of action and of indolence, grant the same ills to both, and
to action there is the readier escape or the nobler consolation.”
Vane shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, my dear friend,” said he, tapping his
snuff-box with benevolent superiority, “you are much younger than I am!”
But these conversations, which Trevylyan and Vane often held
together, dull as I fear this specimen must seem to the reader, had an
inexpressible charm for Gertrude. She loved the lofty and generous vein
of philosophy which Trevylyan embraced, and which, while it suited his
ardent nature, contrasted a demeanour commonly hard and cold to all
but herself. And young and tender as she was, his ambition infused its
spirit into her fine imagination, and that passion for enterprise which
belongs inseparably to romance. She loved to muse over his future lot,
and in fancy to share its toils and to exult in its triumphs. And
if sometimes she asked herself whether a career of action might not
estrange him from her, she had but to turn her gaze upon his watchful
eye,--and lo, he was by her side or at her feet!
CHAPTER VI. GORCUM.--THE TOUR OF THE VIRTUES: A PHILOSOPHER’S TALE.
IT was a bright and cheery morning as they glided by Gorcum. The boats
pulling to the shore full of fishermen and peasants in their national
costume; the breeze freshly rippling the waters; the lightness of the
blue sky; the loud and laughing voices from the boats,--all contributed
to raise the spirit, and fill it with that indescribable gladness which
is the physical sense of life.
The tower of the church, with its long windows and its round dial, rose
against the clear sky; and on a bench under a green bush facing the
water sat a jolly Hollander, refreshing the breezes with the fumes of
his national weed.
“How little it requires to make a journey pleasant, when the companions
are our friends!” said Gertrude, as they sailed along. “Nothing can be
duller than these banks, nothing more delightful than this voyage.”
“Yet what tries the affections of people for each other so severely as
a journey together?” said Vane. “That perpetual companionship from which
there is no escaping; that confinement, in all our moments of ill-humour
and listlessness, with persons who want us to look amused--ah, it is a
severe ordeal for friendship to pass through! A post-chaise must have
jolted many an intimacy to death.”
“You speak feelingly, dear father,” said Gertrude, laughing; “and, I
suspect, with a slight desire to be sarcastic upon us. Yet, seriously,
I should think that travel must be like life, and that good persons must
be always agreeable companions to each other.”
“Good persons, my Gertrude!” answered Vane, with a smile. “Alas! I
fear the good weary each other quite as much as the bad. What say
you, Trevylyan,--would Virtue be a pleasant companion from Paris
to Petersburg? Ah, I see you intend to be on Gertrude’s side of the
question. Well now, if I tell you a story, since stories are so much the
fashion with you, in which you shall find that the Virtues themselves
actually made the experiment of a tour, will you promise to attend to
the moral?”
“Oh, dear father, anything for a story,” cried Gertrude; “especially
from you, who have not told us one all the way. Come, listen, Albert;
nay, listen to your new rival.”
And, pleased to see the vivacity of the invalid, Vane began as
follows:--
THE TOUR OF THE VIRTUES:
A PHILOSOPHER’S TALE.
ONCE upon a time, several of the Virtues, weary of living forever with
the Bishop of Norwich, resolved to make a little excursion; accordingly,
though they knew everything on earth was very ill prepared to receive
them, they thought they might safely venture on a tour from Westminster
Bridge to Richmond. The day was fine, the wind in their favour, and as
to entertainment,--why, there seemed, according to Gertrude, to be no
possibility of any disagreement among the Virtues.
They took a boat at Westminster stairs; and just as they were about to
push off, a poor woman, all in rags, with a child in her arms, implored
their compassion. Charity put her hand into her reticule and took out
a shilling. Justice, turning round to look after the luggage, saw the
folly which Charity was about to commit. “Heavens!” cried Justice,
seizing poor Charity by the arm, “what are you doing? Have you never
read Political Economy? Don’t you know that indiscriminate almsgiving
is only the encouragement to Idleness, the mother of Vice? You a Virtue,
indeed! I’m ashamed of you. Get along with you, good woman;--yet stay,
there is a ticket for soup at the Mendicity Society; they’ll see if
you’re a proper object of compassion.” But Charity is quicker than
Justice, and slipping her hand behind her, the poor woman got the
shilling and the ticket for soup too. Economy and Generosity saw the
double gift. “What waste!” cried Economy, frowning; “what! a ticket and
a shilling? _either_ would have sufficed.”
“Either!” said Generosity, “fie! Charity should have given the poor
creature half-a-crown, and Justice a dozen tickets!” So the next ten
minutes were consumed in a quarrel between the four Virtues, which would
have lasted all the way to Richmond, if Courage had not advised them to
get on shore and fight it out. Upon this, the Virtues suddenly perceived
they had a little forgotten themselves, and Generosity offering the
first apology, they made it up, and went on very agreeably for the next
mile or two.
The day now grew a little overcast, and a shower seemed at hand.
Prudence, who had on a new bonnet, suggested the propriety of putting to
shore for half an hour; Courage was for braving the rain; but, as most
of the Virtues are ladies, Prudence carried it. Just as they were about
to land, another boat cut in before them very uncivilly, and gave theirs
such a shake that Charity was all but overboard. The company on board
the uncivil boat, who evidently thought the Virtues extremely low
persons, for they had nothing very fashionable about their exterior,
burst out laughing at Charity’s discomposure, especially as a
large basket full of buns, which Charity carried with her for any
hungry-looking children she might encounter at Richmond, fell pounce
into the water. Courage was all on fire; he twisted his mustache, and
would have made an onset on the enemy, if, to his great indignation,
Meekness had not forestalled him, by stepping mildly into the hostile
boat and offering both cheeks to the foe. This was too much even for the
incivility of the boatmen; they made their excuses to the Virtues, and
Courage, who is no bully, thought himself bound discontentedly to accept
them. But oh! if you had seen how Courage used Meekness afterwards, you
could not have believed it possible that one Virtue could be so enraged
with another. This quarrel between the two threw a damp on the party;
and they proceeded on their voyage, when the shower was over, with
anything but cordiality. I spare you the little squabbles that took
place in the general conversation,--how Economy found fault with all the
villas by the way, and Temperance expressed becoming indignation at the
luxuries of the City barge. They arrived at Richmond, and Temperance
was appointed to order the dinner; meanwhile Hospitality, walking in the
garden, fell in with a large party of Irishmen, and asked them to join
the repast.
Imagine the long faces of Economy and Prudence, when they saw the
addition to the company! Hospitality was all spirits; he rubbed his
hands and called for champagne with the tone of a younger brother.
Temperance soon grew scandalized, and Modesty herself coloured at some
of the jokes; but Hospitality, who was now half seas over, called the
one a milksop, and swore at the other as a prude. Away went the hours;
it was time to return, and they made down to the water-side, thoroughly
out of temper with one another, Economy and Generosity quarrelling all
the way about the bill and the waiters. To make up the sum of their
mortification, they passed a boat where all the company were in the best
possible spirits, laughing and whooping like mad; and discovered
these jolly companions to be two or three agreeable Vices, who had put
themselves under the management of Good Temper.
“So you see, Gertrude, that even the Virtues may fall at loggerheads
with each other, and pass a very sad time of it, if they happen to be
of opposite dispositions, and have forgotten to take Good Temper with
them.”
“Ah,” said Gertrude, “but you have overloaded your boat; too many
Virtues might contradict one another, but not a few.”
“Voila ce que veux dire,” said Vane; “but listen to the sequel of my
tale, which now takes a new moral.”
At the end of the voyage, and after a long, sulky silence, Prudence
said, with a thoughtful air, “My dear friends, I have been thinking that
as long as we keep so entirely together, never mixing with the rest of
the world, we shall waste our lives in quarrelling amongst ourselves and
run the risk of being still less liked and sought after than we already
are. You know that we are none of us popular; every one is quite
contented to see us represented in a vaudeville, or described in an
essay. Charity, indeed, has her name often taken in vain at a bazaar
or a subscription; and the miser as often talks of the duty he owes to
_me_, when he sends the stranger from his door or his grandson to jail:
but still we only resemble so many wild beasts, whom everybody likes
to see but nobody cares to possess. Now, I propose that we should all
separate and take up our abode with some mortal or other for a year,
with the power of changing at the end of that time should we not feel
ourselves comfortable,--that is, should we not find that we do all the
good we intend; let us try the experiment, and on this day twelvemonths
let us all meet under the largest oak in Windsor Forest, and recount
what has befallen us.” Prudence ceased, as she always does when she has
said enough; and, delighted at the project, the Virtues agreed to
adopt it on the spot. They were enchanted at the idea of setting up for
themselves, and each not doubting his or her success,--for Economy in
her heart thought Generosity no Virtue at all, and Meekness looked on
Courage as little better than a heathen.
Generosity, being the most eager and active of all the Virtues, set off
first on his journey. Justice followed, and kept up with him, though at
a more even pace. Charity never heard a sigh, or saw a squalid face, but
she stayed to cheer and console the sufferer,--a kindness which somewhat
retarded her progress.
Courage espied a travelling carriage, with a man and his wife in it
quarrelling most conjugally, and he civilly begged he might be permitted
to occupy the vacant seat opposite the lady. Economy still lingered,
inquiring for the cheapest inns. Poor Modesty looked round and sighed,
on finding herself so near to London, where she was almost wholly
unknown; but resolved to bend her course thither for two reasons:
first, for the novelty of the thing; and, secondly, not liking to expose
herself to any risks by a journey on the Continent. Prudence, though
the first to project, was the last to execute; and therefore resolved to
remain where she was for that night, and take daylight for her travels.
The year rolled on, and the Virtues, punctual to the appointment, met
under the oak-tree; they all came nearly at the same time, excepting
Economy, who had got into a return post-chaise, the horses to which,
having been forty miles in the course of the morning, had foundered by
the way, and retarded her journey till night set in. The Virtues looked
sad and sorrowful, as people are wont to do after a long and fruitless
journey; and, somehow or other, such was the wearing effect of their
intercourse with the world, that they appeared wonderfully diminished in
size.
“Ah, my dear Generosity,” said Prudence, with a sigh, “as you were
the first to set out on your travels, pray let us hear your adventures
first.”
“You must know, my dear sisters,” said Generosity, “that I had not gone
many miles from you before I came to a small country town, in which a
marching regiment was quartered, and at an open window I beheld, leaning
over a gentleman’s chair, the most beautiful creature imagination ever
pictured; her eyes shone out like two suns of perfect happiness, and she
was almost cheerful enough to have passed for Good Temper herself. The
gentleman over whose chair she leaned was her husband; they had been
married six weeks; he was a lieutenant with one hundred pounds a
year besides his pay. Greatly affected by their poverty, I instantly
determined, without a second thought, to ensconce myself in the heart
of this charming girl. During the first hour in my new residence I made
many wise reflections such as--that Love never was so perfect as when
accompanied by Poverty; what a vulgar error it was to call the unmarried
state ‘Single _Blessedness_;’ how wrong it was of us Virtues never to
have tried the marriage bond; and what a falsehood it was to say that
husbands neglected their wives, for never was there anything in nature
so devoted as the love of a husband--six weeks married!
“The next morning, before breakfast, as the charming Fanny was
waiting for her husband, who had not yet finished his toilet, a poor,
wretched-looking object appeared at the window, tearing her hair and
wringing her hands; her husband had that morning been dragged to prison,
and her seven children had fought for the last mouldy crust. Prompted
by me, Fanny, without inquiring further into the matter, drew from her
silken purse a five-pound note, and gave it to the beggar, who departed
more amazed than grateful. Soon after, the lieutenant appeared. ‘What
the devil, another bill!’ muttered he, as he tore the yellow wafer from
a large, square, folded, bluish piece of paper. ‘Oh, ah! confound the
fellow, _he_ must be paid. I must trouble you, Fanny, for fifteen pounds
to pay this saddler’s bill.’
“‘Fifteen pounds, love?’ stammered Fanny, blushing.
“‘Yes, dearest, the fifteen pounds I gave you yesterday.’
“‘I have only ten pounds,’ said Fanny, hesitatingly; ‘for such a poor,
wretched-looking creature was here just now, that I was obliged to give
her five pounds.’
“‘Five pounds? good Heavens!’ exclaimed the astonished husband; ‘I shall
have no more money this three weeks.’ He frowned, he bit his lips, nay,
he even wrung his hands, and walked up and down the room; worse still,
he broke forth with--‘Surely, madam, you did not suppose, when you
married a lieutenant in a marching regiment, that he could afford to
indulge in the whim of giving five pounds to every mendicant who held
out her hand to you? You did not, I say, madam, imagine’--but the
bridegroom was interrupted by the convulsive sobs of his wife: it was
their first quarrel, they were but six weeks married; he looked at
her for one moment sternly, the next he was at her feet. ‘Forgive me,
dearest Fanny,--forgive me, for I cannot forgive myself. I was too great
a wretch to say what I did; and do believe, my own Fanny, that while
I may be too poor to indulge you in it, I do from my heart admire so
noble, so disinterested, a generosity.’ Not a little proud did I feel
to have been the cause of this exemplary husband’s admiration for his
amiable wife, and sincerely did I rejoice at having taken up my abode
with these _poor_ people. But not to tire you, my dear sisters, with the
minutiae of detail, I shall briefly say that things did not long remain
in this delightful position; for before many months had elapsed, poor
Fanny had to bear with her husband’s increased and more frequent
storms of passion, unfollowed by any halcyon and honeymoon suings for
forgiveness: for at my instigation every shilling went; and when there
were no more to go, her trinkets and even her clothes followed. The
lieutenant became a complete brute, and even allowed his unbridled
tongue to call me--me, sisters, _me_!--‘heartless Extravagance.’ His
despicable brother-officers and their gossiping wives were no better;
for they did nothing but animadvert upon my Fanny’s ostentation and
absurdity, for by such names had they the impertinence to call _me_.
Thus grieved to the soul to find myself the cause of all poor Fanny’s
misfortunes, I resolved at the end of the year to leave her, being
thoroughly convinced that, however amiable and praiseworthy I might be
in myself, I was totally unfit to be bosom friend and adviser to the
wife of a lieutenant in a marching regiment, with only one hundred
pounds a year besides his pay.”
The Virtues groaned their sympathy with the unfortunate Fanny; and
Prudence, turning to Justice, said, “I long to hear what you have been
doing, for I am certain you cannot have occasioned harm to any one.”
Justice shook her head and said: “Alas! I find that there are times and
places when even I do better not to appear, as a short account of my
adventures will prove to you. No sooner had I left you than I instantly
repaired to India, and took up my abode with a Brahmin. I was much
shocked by the dreadful inequalities of condition that reigned in
the several castes, and I longed to relieve the poor Pariah from his
ignominious destiny; accordingly I set seriously to work on reform.
I insisted upon the iniquity of abandoning men from their birth to an
irremediable state of contempt, from which no virtue could exalt them.
The Brahmins looked upon my Brahmin with ineffable horror. They called
_me_ the most wicked of vices; they saw no distinction between Justice
and Atheism. I uprooted their society--that was sufficient crime. But
the worst was, that the Pariahs themselves regarded me with suspicion;
they thought it unnatural in a Brahmin to care for a Pariah! And one
called me ‘Madness,’ another, ‘Ambition,’ and a third, ‘The Desire to
innovate.’ My poor Brahmin led a miserable life of it; when one day,
after observing, at my dictation, that he thought a Pariah’s life as
much entitled to respect as a cow’s, he was hurried away by the priests
and secretly broiled on the altar as a fitting reward for his sacrilege.
I fled hither in great tribulation, persuaded that in some countries
even Justice may do harm.”
“As for me,” said Charity, not waiting to be asked, “I grieve to say
that I was silly enough to take up my abode with an old lady in Dublin,
who never knew what discretion was, and always acted from impulse;
my instigation was irresistible, and the money she gave in her drives
through the suburbs of Dublin was so lavishly spent that it kept all
the rascals of the city in idleness and whiskey. I found, to my great
horror, that I was a main cause of a terrible epidemic, and that to give
alms without discretion was to spread poverty without help. I left the
city when my year was out, and as ill-luck would have it, just at the
time when I was most wanted.”
“And oh,” cried Hospitality, “I went to Ireland also. I fixed my abode
with a squireen; I ruined him in a year, and only left him because he
had no longer a hovel to keep me in.”
“As for myself,” said Temperance, “I entered the breast of an English
legislator, and he brought in a bill against ale-houses; the consequence
was, that the labourers took to gin; and I have been forced to confess
that Temperance may be too zealous when she dictates too vehemently to
others.”
“Well,” said Courage, keeping more in the background than he had ever
done before, and looking rather ashamed of himself, “that travelling
carriage I got into belonged to a German general and his wife, who were
returning to their own country. Growing very cold as we proceeded, she
wrapped me up in a polonaise; but the cold increasing, I inadvertently
crept into her bosom. Once there I could not get out, and from
thenceforward the poor general had considerably the worst of it.
She became so provoking that I wondered how he could refrain from an
explosion. To do him justice, he did at last threaten to get out of the
carriage; upon which, roused by me, she collared him--and conquered.
When he got to his own district, things grew worse, for if any
_aide-de-camp_ offended her she insisted that he might be publicly
reprimanded; and should the poor general refuse she would with her own
hands confer a caning upon the delinquent. The additional force she had
gained in me was too much odds against the poor general, and he died of
a broken heart, six months after my _liaison_ with his wife. She after
this became so dreaded and detested, that a conspiracy was formed to
poison her; this daunted even me, so I left her without delay,--_et me
voici_!”
“Humph,” said Meekness, with an air of triumph, “I, at least, have been
more successful than you. On seeing much in the papers of the cruelties
practised by the Turks on the Greeks, I thought my presence would enable
the poor sufferers to bear their misfortunes calmly. I went to Greece,
then, at a moment when a well-planned and practicable scheme of
emancipating themselves from the Turkish yoke was arousing their youth.
Without confining myself to one individual, I flitted from breast
to breast; I meekened the whole nation; my remonstrances against the
insurrection succeeded, and I had the satisfaction of leaving a
whole people ready to be killed or strangled with the most Christian
resignation in the world.”
The Virtues, who had been a little cheered by the opening
self-complacence of Meekness, would not, to her great astonishment,
allow that she had succeeded a whit more happily than her sisters, and
called next upon Modesty for her confession.
“You know,” said that amiable young lady, “that I went to London in
search of a situation. I spent three months of the twelve in going from
house to house, but I could not get a single person to receive me.
The ladies declared that they never saw so old-fashioned a gawkey, and
civilly recommended me to their abigails; the abigails turned me
round with a stare, and then pushed me down to the kitchen and the fat
scullion-maids, who assured me that, ‘in the respectable families they
had the honour to live in, they had never even heard of my name.’ One
young housemaid, just from the country, did indeed receive me with some
sort of civility; but she very soon lost me in the servants’ hall. I
now took refuge with the other sex, as the least uncourteous. I was
fortunate enough to find a young gentleman of remarkable talents, who
welcomed me with open arms. He was full of learning, gentleness, and
honesty. I had only one rival,--Ambition. We both contended for an
absolute empire over him. Whatever Ambition suggested, I damped. Did
Ambition urge him to begin a book, I persuaded him it was not worth
publication. Did he get up, full of knowledge, and instigated by my
rival, to make a speech (for he was in parliament), I shocked him with
the sense of his assurance, I made his voice droop and his accents
falter. At last, with an indignant sigh, my rival left him; he retired
into the country, took orders, and renounced a career he had fondly
hoped would be serviceable to others; but finding I did not suffice for
his happiness, and piqued at his melancholy, I left him before the end
of the year, and he has since taken to drinking!”
The eyes of the Virtues were all turned to Prudence. She was their last
hope. “I am just where I set out,” said that discreet Virtue; “I have
done neither good nor harm. To avoid temptation I went and lived with a
hermit to whom I soon found that I could be of no use beyond warning him
not to overboil his peas and lentils, not to leave his door open when
a storm threatened, and not to fill his pitcher too full at the
neighbouring spring. I am thus the only one of you that never did harm;
but only because I am the only one of you that never had an opportunity
of doing it! In a word,” continued Prudence, thoughtfully,--“in a word,
my friends, circumstances are necessary to the Virtues themselves. Had,
for instance, Economy changed with Generosity, and gone to the poor
lieutenant’s wife, and had I lodged with the Irish squireen instead of
Hospitality, what misfortunes would have been saved to both! Alas! I
perceive we lose all our efficacy when we are misplaced; and _then_,
though in reality Virtues, we operate as Vices. Circumstances must be
favourable to our exertions, and harmonious with our nature; and we
lose our very divinity unless Wisdom direct our footsteps to the home we
should inhabit and the dispositions we should govern.”
The story was ended, and the travellers began to dispute about its
moral. Here let us leave them.
CHAPTER VII. COLOGNE.--THE TRACES OF THE ROMAN YOKE.--THE CHURCH OF ST.
MARIA.--TREVYLYAN’S REFLECTIONS ON THE MONASTIC LIFE.--THE TOMB OF THE
THREE KINGS.--AN EVENING EXCURSION ON THE RHINE.
ROME--magnificent Rome! wherever the pilgrim wends, the traces of thy
dominion greet his eyes. Still in the heart of the bold German race is
graven the print of the eagle’s claws; and amidst the haunted regions of
the Rhine we pause to wonder at the great monuments of the Italian yoke.
At Cologne our travellers rested for some days. They were in the city
to which the camp of Marcus Agrippa had given birth; that spot had
resounded with the armed tread of the legions of Trajan. In that city,
Vitellius, Sylvanus, were proclaimed emperors. By that church did the
latter receive his death.
As they passed round the door they saw some peasants loitering on the
sacred ground; and when they noted the delicate cheek of Gertrude they
uttered their salutations with more than common respect. Where they then
were the building swept round in a circular form; and at its base it is
supposed by tradition to retain something of the ancient Roman masonry.
Just before them rose the spire of a plain and unadorned church,
singularly contrasting the pomp of the old with the simplicity of the
innovating creed.
The church of St. Maria occupies the site of the Roman Capitol, and the
place retains the Roman name; and still something in the aspect of the
people betrays the hereditary blood.
Gertrude, whose nature was strongly impressed with _the venerating
character_, was fond of visiting the old Gothic churches, which, with so
eloquent a moral, unite the living with the dead.
“Pause for a moment,” said Trevylyan, before they entered the church of
St. Maria. “What recollections crowd upon us! On the site of the Roman
Capitol a Christian church and a convent are erected! By whom? The
mother of Charles Martel,--the Conqueror of the Saracen, the arch-hero
of Christendom itself! And to these scenes and calm retreats, to the
cloisters of the convent once belonging to this church, fled the bruised
spirit of a royal sufferer,-the victim of Richelieu,--the unfortunate
and ambitious Mary de Medicis. Alas! the cell and the convent are but a
vain emblem of that desire to fly to God which belongs to Distress; the
solitude soothes, but the monotony recalls, regret. And for my own part
in my frequent tours through Catholic countries, I never saw the still
walls in which monastic vanity hoped to shut out the world, but a
melancholy came over me! What hearts at war with themselves! what
unceasing regrets! what pinings after the past! what long and beautiful
years devoted to a moral grave, by a momentary rashness, an impulse, a
disappointment! But in these churches the lesson is more impressive and
less sad. The weary heart has ceased to ache; the burning pulses are
still; the troubled spirit has flown to the only rest which is not a
deceit. Power and love, hope and fear, avarice, ambition,--they are
quenched at last! Death is the only monastery, the tomb is the only
cell.”
“Your passion is ever for active life,” said Gertrude. “You allow no
charm to solitude, and contemplation to you seems torture. If any great
sorrow ever come upon you, you will never retire to seclusion as its
balm. You will plunge into the world, and lose your individual existence
in the universal rush of life.”
“Ah, talk not of sorrow!” said Trevylyan, wildly. “Let us enter the
church.”
They went afterwards to the celebrated cathedral, which is considered
one of the noblest of the architectural triumphs of Germany; but it is
yet more worthy of notice from the Pilgrim of Romance than the searcher
after antiquity, for here, behind the grand altar, is the Tomb of the
Three Kings of Cologne,--the three worshippers whom tradition humbled to
our Saviour. Legend is rife with a thousand tales of the relics of this
tomb. The Three Kings of Cologne are the tutelary names of that golden
superstition which has often more votaries than the religion itself from
which it springs and to Gertrude the simple story of Lucille sufficed
to make her for the moment credulous of the sanctity of the spot. Behind
the tomb three Gothic windows cast their “dim, religious light” over the
tessellated pavement and along the Ionic pillars. They found some of
the more credulous believers in the authenticity of the relics kneeling
before the tomb, and they arrested their steps, fearful to disturb the
superstition which is never without something of sanctity when contented
with prayer and forgetful of persecution. The bones of the Magi are
still supposed to consecrate the tomb, and on the higher part of
the monument the artist has delineated their adoration to the infant
Saviour.
That evening came on with a still and tranquil beauty, and as the sun
hastened to its close they launched their boat for an hour or two’s
excursion upon the Rhine. Gertrude was in that happy mood when the quiet
of nature is enjoyed like a bath for the soul, and the presence of
him she so idolized deepened that stillness into a more delicious and
subduing calm. Little did she dream as the boat glided over the water,
and the towers of Cologne rose in the blue air of evening, how few were
those hours that divided her from the tomb! But, in looking back to the
life of one we have loved, how dear is the thought that the latter days
were the days of light, that the cloud never chilled the beauty of the
setting sun, and that if the years of existence were brief, all that
existence has most tender, most sacred, was crowded into that space!
Nothing dark, then, or bitter, rests with our remembrance of the lost:
_we_ are the mourners, but pity is not for the mourned,--our grief is
purely selfish; when we turn to its object, the hues of happiness are
round it, and that very love which is the parent of our woe was the
consolation, the triumph, of the departed!
The majestic Rhine was calm as a lake; the splashing of the oar only
broke the stillness, and after a long pause in their conversation,
Gertrude, putting her hand on Trevylyan’s arm, reminded him of a
promised story: for he too had moods of abstraction, from which, in her
turn, she loved to lure him; and his voice to her had become a sort of
want.
“Let it be,” said she, “a tale suited to the hour; no fierce
tradition,--nay, no grotesque fable, but of the tenderer dye of
superstition. Let it be of love, of woman’s love,--of the love that
defies the grave: for surely even after death it lives; and heaven would
scarcely be heaven if memory were banished from its blessings.”
“I recollect,” said Trevylyan, after a slight pause, “a short German
legend, the simplicity of which touched me much when I heard it; but,”
added he, with a slight smile, “so much more faithful appears in the
legend the love of the woman than that of the man, that _I_ at least
ought scarcely to recite it.”
“Nay,” said Gertrude, tenderly, “the fault of the inconstant only
heightens our gratitude to the faithful.”
CHAPTER VIII. THE SOUL IN PURGATORY; OR LOVE STRONGER THAN DEATH.
THE angels strung their harps in heaven, and their music went up like
a stream of odours to the pavilions of the Most High; but the harp
of Seralim was sweeter than that of his fellows, and the Voice of
the Invisible One (for the angels themselves know not the glories of
Jehovah--only far in the depths of heaven they see one Unsleeping Eye
watching forever over Creation) was heard saying,--
“Ask a gift for the love that burns in thy song, and it shall be given
thee.” And Seralim answered,--
“There is in that place which men call Purgatory, and which is the
escape from hell, but the painful porch of heaven, many souls that adore
Thee, and yet are punished justly for their sins; grant me the boon to
visit them at times, and solace their suffering by the hymns of the harp
that is consecrated to Thee!”
And the Voice answered,--
“Thy prayer is heard, O gentlest of the angels! and it seems good to Him
who chastises but from love. Go! Thou hast thy will.”
Then the angel sang the praises of God; and when the song was done he
rose from his azure throne at the right hand of Gabriel, and, spreading
his rainbow wings, he flew to that melancholy orb which, nearest to
earth, echoes with the shrieks of souls that by torture become pure.
There the unhappy ones see from afar the bright courts they are
hereafter to obtain, and the shapes of glorious beings, who, fresh from
these Fountains of Immortality, walk amidst the gardens of Paradise,
and feel that their happiness hath no morrow; and this thought consoles
amidst their torments, and makes the true difference between Purgatory
and Hell.
Then the angel folded his wings, and entering the crystal gates, sat
down upon a blasted rock and struck his divine lyre, and a peace fell
over the wretched; the demon ceased to torture and the victim to wail.
As sleep to the mourners of earth was the song of the angel to the
souls of the purifying star: one only voice amidst the general stillness
seemed not lulled by the angel; it was the voice of a woman, and it
continued to cry out with a sharp cry,--
“Oh, Adenheim, Adenheim! mourn not for the lost!”
The angel struck chord after chord, till his most skilful melodies were
exhausted; but still the solitary voice, unheeding--unconscious of--the
sweetest harp of the angel choir, cried out,--
“Oh, Adenheim, Adenheim! mourn not for the lost!”
Then Seralim’s interest was aroused, and approaching the spot whence the
voice came, he saw the spirit of a young and beautiful girl chained to
a rock, and the demons lying idly by. And Seralim said to the demons,
“Doth the song lull ye thus to rest?”
And they answered, “Her care for another is bitterer than all our
torments; therefore are we idle.”
Then the angel approached the spirit, and said in a voice which stilled
her cry--for in what state do we outlive sympathy?--“Wherefore, O
daughter of earth, wherefore wailest thou with the same plaintive wail;
and why doth the harp that soothes the most guilty of thy companions
fail in its melody with thee?”
“O radiant stranger,” answered the poor spirit, “thou speakest to one
who on earth loved God’s creature more than God; therefore is she thus
justly sentenced. But I know that my poor Adenheim mourns ceaselessly
for me, and the thought of his sorrow is more intolerable to me than all
that the demons can inflict.”
“And how knowest thou that he laments thee?” asked the angel.
“Because I know with what agony I should have mourned for _him_,”
replied the spirit, simply.
The divine nature of the angel was touched; for love is the nature of
the sons of heaven. “And how,” said he, “can I minister to thy sorrow?”
A transport seemed to agitate the spirit, and she lifted up her mistlike
and impalpable arms, and cried,--
“Give me--oh, give me to return to earth, but for one little hour,
that I may visit my Adenheim; and that, concealing from him my present
sufferings, I may comfort him in his own.”
“Alas!” said the angel, turning away his eyes,--for angels may not weep
in the sight of others,--“I could, indeed, grant thee this boon, but
thou knowest not the penalty. For the souls in Purgatory may return to
Earth, but heavy is the sentence that awaits their return. In a word,
for one hour on earth thou must add a thousand years to the torture of
thy confinement here!”
“Is that all?” cried the spirit. “Willingly then will I brave the doom.
Ah, surely they love not in heaven, or thou wouldst know, O Celestial
Visitant; that one hour of consolation to the one we love is worth a
thousand ages of torture to ourselves! Let me comfort and convince my
Adenheim; no matter what becomes of me.”
Then the angel looked on high, and he saw in far distant regions, which
in that orb none else could discern, the rays that parted from the
all-guarding Eye; and heard the VOICE of the Eternal One bidding him
act as his pity whispered. He looked on the spirit, and her shadowy arms
stretched pleadingly towards him; he uttered the word that loosens the
bars of the gate of Purgatory; and lo, the spirit had re-entered the
human world.
It was night in the halls of the lord of Adenheim, and he sat at the
head of his glittering board. Loud and long was the laugh, and merry
the jest that echoed round; and the laugh and the jest of the lord of
Adenheim were louder and merrier than all. And by his right side sat a
beautiful lady; and ever and anon he turned from others to whisper soft
vows in her ear.
“And oh,” said the bright dame of Falkenberg, “thy words what ladye can
believe? Didst thou not utter the same oaths, and promise the same love,
to Ida, the fair daughter of Loden, and now but three little months have
closed upon her grave?”
“By my halidom,” quoth the young lord of Adenheim, “thou dost thy beauty
marvellous injustice. Ida! Nay, thou mockest me; _I_ love the daughter
of Loden! Why, how then should I be worthy thee? A few gay words, a few
passing smiles,--behold all the love Adenheim ever bore to Ida. Was
it my fault if the poor fool misconstrued such common courtesy? Nay,
dearest lady, this heart is virgin to thee.”
“And what!” said the lady of Falkenberg, as she suffered the arm of
Adenheim to encircle her slender waist, “didst thou not grieve for her
loss?”
“Why, verily, yes, for the first week; but in thy bright eyes I found
ready consolation.”
At this moment, the lord of Adenheim thought he heard a deep sigh behind
him; he turned, but saw nothing, save a slight mist that gradually faded
away, and vanished in the distance. Where was the necessity for Ida to
reveal herself?
.......
“And thou didst not, then, do thine errand to thy lover?” said Seralim,
as the spirit of the wronged Ida returned to Purgatory.
“Bid the demons recommence their torture,” was poor Ida’s answer.
“And was it for this that thou added a thousand years to thy doom?”
“Alas!” answered Ida, “after the single hour I have endured on Earth,
there seems to be but little terrible in a thousand fresh years of
Purgatory!”*
* This story is principally borrowed from a foreign soil. It
seemed to the author worthy of being transferred to an English
one, although he fears that much of its singular beauty in the
original has been lost by the way.
“What! is the story ended?” asked Gertrude.
“Yes.”
“Nay, surely the thousand years were not added to poor Ida’s doom; and
Seralim bore her back with him to Heaven?”
“The legend saith no more. The writer was contented to show us the
perpetuity of woman’s love--”
“And its reward,” added Vane.
“It was not _I_ who drew that last conclusion, Albert,” whispered
Gertrude.
CHAPTER IX. THE SCENERY OF THE RHINE ANALOGOUS TO THE GERMAN LITERARY
GENIUS.--THE DRACHENFELS.
ON leaving Cologne, the stream winds round among banks that do not yet
fulfil the promise of the Rhine; but they increase in interest as you
leave Surdt and Godorf. The peculiar character of the river does not,
however, really appear, until by degrees the Seven Mountains, and “THE
CASTLED CRAG OF DRACHENFELS” above them all, break upon the eye. Around
Nieder Cassel and Rheidt the vines lie thick and clustering; and, by the
shore, you see from place to place the islands stretching their green
length along, and breaking the exulting tide. Village rises upon
village, and viewed from the distance as you sail, the pastoral errors
that enamoured us of the village life crowd thick and fast upon us.
So still do these hamlets seem, so sheltered from the passions of the
world,--as if the passions were not like winds, only felt where they
breathe, and invisible save by their effects! Leaping into the broad
bosom of the Rhine come many a stream and rivulet upon either side.
Spire upon spire rises and sinks as you sail on. Mountain and city,
the solitary island, the castled steep, like the dreams of ambition,
suddenly appear, proudly swell, and dimly fade away.
“You begin now,” said Trevylyan, “to understand the character of
the German literature. The Rhine is an emblem of its luxuriance, its
fertility, its romance. The best commentary to the German genius is a
visit to the German scenery. The mighty gloom of the Hartz, the feudal
towers that look over vines and deep valleys on the legendary Rhine;
the gigantic remains of antique power, profusely scattered over plain,
mount, and forest; the thousand mixed recollections that hallow the
ground; the stately Roman, the stalwart Goth, the chivalry of the feudal
age, and the dim brotherhood of the ideal world, have here alike their
record and their remembrance. And over such scenes wanders the young
German student. Instead of the pomp and luxury of the English traveller,
the thousand devices to cheat the way, he has but his volume in his
hand, his knapsack at his back. From such scenes he draws and hives
all that various store which after years ripen to invention. Hence
the florid mixture of the German muse,--the classic, the romantic, the
contemplative, the philosophic, and the superstitious; each the result
of actual meditation over different scenes; each the produce of separate
but confused recollections. As the Rhine flows, so flows the national
genius, by mountain and valley, the wildest solitude, the sudden spires
of ancient cities, the mouldered castle, the stately monastery, the
humble cot,--grandeur and homeliness, history and superstition, truth
and fable, succeeding one another so as to blend into a whole.
“But,” added Trevylyan, a moment afterwards, “the Ideal is passing
slowly away from the German mind; a spirit for the more active and the
more material literature is springing up amongst them. The revolution
of mind gathers on, preceding stormy events; and the memories that
led their grandsires to contemplate will urge the youth of the next
generation to dare and to act.” *
* Is not this prediction already fulfilled?--1849.
Thus conversing, they continued their voyage, with a fair wave and
beneath a lucid sky.
The vessel now glided beside the Seven Mountains and the Drachenfels.
The sun, slowly setting, cast his yellow beams over the smooth waters.
At the foot of the mountains lay a village deeply sequestered in shade;
and above, the Ruin of the Drachenfels caught the richest beams of the
sun. Yet thus alone, though lofty, the ray cheered not the gloom that
hung over the giant rock: it stood on high, like some great name on
which the light of glory may shine, but which is associated with a
certain melancholy, from the solitude to which its very height above the
level of the herd condemned its owner!
CHAPTER X. THE LEGEND OF ROLAND.--THE ADVENTURES OF NYMPHALIN ON THE
ISLAND OF NONNEWERTH.--HER SONG.--THE DECAY OF THE FAIRY-FAITH IN
ENGLAND.
ON the shore opposite the Drachenfels stand the Ruins of
Rolandseck,--they are the shattered crown of a lofty and perpendicular
mountain, consecrated to the memory of the brave Roland; below, the
trees of an island to which the lady of Roland retired, rise thick and
verdant from the smooth tide.
Nothing can exceed the eloquent and wild grandeur of the whole scene.
That spot is the pride and beauty of the Rhine.
The legend that consecrates the tower and the island is briefly told; it
belongs to a class so common to the Romaunts of Germany. Roland goes to
the wars. A false report of his death reaches his betrothed. She retires
to the convent in the isle of Nonnewerth, and takes the irrevocable
veil. Roland returns home, flushed with glory and hope, to find that
the very fidelity of his affianced had placed an eternal barrier between
them. He built the castle that bears his name, and which overlooks the
monastery, and dwelt there till his death,--happy in the power at least
to gaze, even to the last, upon those walls which held the treasure he
had lost.
The willows droop in mournful luxuriance along the island, and harmonize
with the memory that, through the desert of a thousand years, love still
keeps green and fresh. Nor hath it permitted even those additions of
fiction which, like mosses, gather by time over the truth that they
adorn, yet adorning conceal, to mar the simple tenderness of the legend.
All was still in the island of Nonnewerth; the lights shone through the
trees from the house that contained our travellers. On one smooth spot
where the islet shelves into the Rhine met the wandering fairies.
“Oh, Pipalee! how beautiful!” cried Nymphalin, as she stood enraptured
by the wave, a star-beam shining on her, with her yellow hair “dancing
its ringlets in the whistling wind.” “For the first time since our
departure I do not miss the green fields of England.”
“Hist!” said Pipalee, under her breath; “I hear fairy steps,--they must
be the steps of strangers.”
“Let us retreat into this thicket of weeds,” said Nymphalin, somewhat
alarmed; “the good lord treasurer is already asleep there.” They whisked
into what to them was a forest, for the reeds were two feet high, and
there sure enough they found the lord treasurer stretched beneath a
bulrush, with his pipe beside him, for since he had been in Germany he
had taken to smoking; and indeed wild thyme, properly dried, makes very
good tobacco for a fairy. They also found Nip and Trip sitting very
close together, Nip playing with her hair, which was exceedingly
beautiful.
“What do you do here?” said Pipalee, shortly; for she was rather an old
maid, and did not like fairies to be too close to each other.
“Watching my lord’s slumber,” said Nip.
“Pshaw!” said Pipalee.
“Nay,” quoth Trip, blushing like a sea-shell; “there is no harm in
_that_, I’m sure.”
“Hush!” said the queen, peeping through the reeds.
And now forth from the green bosom of the earth came a tiny train;
slowly, two by two, hand in hand, they swept from a small aperture,
shadowed with fragrant herbs, and formed themselves into a ring: then
came other fairies, laden with dainties, and presently two beautiful
white mushrooms sprang up, on which the viands were placed, and lo,
there was a banquet! Oh, how merry they were! what gentle peals of
laughter, loud as a virgin’s sigh! what jests! what songs! Happy race!
if mortals could see you as often as I do, in the soft nights of summer,
they would never be at a loss for entertainment. But as our English
fairies looked on, they saw that these foreign elves were of a different
race from themselves: they were taller and less handsome, their hair was
darker, they wore mustaches, and had something of a fiercer air. Poor
Nymphalin was a little frightened; but presently soft music was heard
floating along, something like the sound we suddenly hear of a still
night when a light breeze steals through rushes, or wakes a ripple in
some shallow brook dancing over pebbles. And lo, from the aperture of
the earth came forth a fay, superbly dressed, and of a noble presence.
The queen started back, Pipalee rubbed her eyes, Trip looked over
Pipalee’s shoulder, and Nip, pinching her arm, cried out amazed, “By the
last new star, that is Prince von Fayzenheim!”
Poor Nymphalin gazed again, and her little heart beat under her
bee’s-wing bodice as if it would break. The prince had a melancholy air,
and he sat apart from the banquet, gazing abstractedly on the Rhine.
“Ah!” whispered Nymphalin to herself, “does he think of me?”
Presently the prince drew forth a little flute hollowed from a small
reed, and began to play a mournful air. Nymphalin listened with delight;
it was one he had learned in her dominions.
When the air was over, the prince rose, and approaching the banqueters,
despatched them on different errands; one to visit the dwarf of the
Drachenfels, another to look after the grave of Musaeus, and a whole
detachment to puzzle the students of Heidelberg. A few launched
themselves upon willow leaves on the Rhine to cruise about in the
starlight, and an other band set out a hunting after the gray-legged
moth. The prince was left alone; and now Nymphalin, seeing the coast
clear, wrapped herself up in a cloak made out of a withered leaf; and
only letting her eyes glow out from the hood, she glided from the reeds,
and the prince turning round, saw a dark fairy figure by his side. He
drew back, a little startled, and placed his hand on his sword, when
Nymphalin circling round him, sang the following words:--
THE FAIRY’S REPROACH.
I. By the glow-worm’s lamp in the dewy brake;
By the gossamer’s airy net;
By the shifting skin of the faithless snake,
Oh, teach me to forget:
For none, ah none
Can teach so well that human spell
As thou, false one!
II. By the fairy dance on the greensward smooth;
By the winds of the gentle west;
By the loving stars, when their soft looks soothe
The waves on their mother’s breast,
Teach me thy lore!
By which, like withered flowers,
The leaves of buried Hours
Blossom no more!
III. By the tent in the violet’s bell;
By the may on the scented bough;
By the lone green isle where my sisters dwell;
And thine own forgotten vow,
Teach me to live,
Nor feed on thoughts that pine
For love so false as thine!
Teach me thy lore,
And one thou lov’st no more
Will bless thee and forgive!
“Surely,” said Fayzenheim, faltering, “surely I know that voice!”
And Nymphalin’s cloak dropped off her shoulder. “My English fairy!” and
Fayzenheim knelt beside her.
I wish you had seen the fay kneel, for you would have sworn it was so
like a human lover that you would never have sneered at love afterwards.
Love is so fairy-like a part of us, that even a fairy cannot make it
differently from us,--that is to say, when we love truly.
There was great joy in the island that night among the elves. They
conducted Nymphalin to their palace within the earth, and feasted her
sumptuously; and Nip told their adventures with so much spirit that
he enchanted the merry foreigners. But Fayzenheim talked apart to
Nymphalin, and told her how he was lord of that island, and how he had
been obliged to return to his dominions by the law of his tribe, which
allowed him to be absent only a certain time in every year. “But, my
queen, I always intended to revisit thee next spring.”
“Thou need’st not have left us so abruptly,” said Nymphalin, blushing.
“But do _thou_ never leave me!” said the ardent fairy; “be mine, and let
our nuptials be celebrated on these shores. Wouldst thou sigh for thy
green island? No! for _there_ the fairy altars are deserted, the faith
is gone from the land; thou art among the last of an unhonoured and
expiring race. Thy mortal poets are dumb, and Fancy, which was thy
priestess, sleeps hushed in her last repose. New and hard creeds have
succeeded to the fairy lore. Who steals through the starlit boughs on
the nights of June to watch the roundels of thy tribe? The wheels of
commerce, the din of trade, have silenced to mortal ear the music of thy
subjects’ harps! And the noisy habitations of men, harsher than their
dreaming sires, are gathering round the dell and vale where thy co-mates
linger: a few years, and where will be the green solitudes of England?”
The queen sighed, and the prince, perceiving that he was listened to,
continued,--
“Who, in thy native shores, among the children of men, now claims the
fairy’s care? What cradle wouldst thou tend? On what maid wouldst thou
shower thy rosy gifts? What barb wouldst thou haunt in his dreams? Poesy
is fled the island, why shouldst thou linger behind? Time hath brought
dull customs, that laugh at thy gentle being. Puck is buried in the
harebell, he hath left no offspring, and none mourn for his loss; for
night, which is the fairy season, is busy and garish as the day. What
hearth is desolate after the curfew? What house bathed in stillness
at the hour in which thy revels commence? Thine empire among men hath
passed from thee, and thy race are vanishing from the crowded soil; for,
despite our diviner nature, our existence is linked with man’s. Their
neglect is our disease, their forgetfulness our death. Leave then those
dull, yet troubled scenes, that are closing round the fairy rings of thy
native isle. These mountains, this herbage, these gliding waves, these
mouldering ruins, these starred rivulets, be they, O beautiful fairy!
thy new domain. Yet in these lands our worship lingers; still can we
fill the thought of the young bard, and mingle with his yearnings
after the Beautiful, the Unseen. Hither come the pilgrims of the world,
anxious only to gather from these scenes the legends of Us; ages will
pass away ere the Rhine shall be desecrated of our haunting presence.
Come then, my queen, let this palace be thine own, and the moon that
glances over the shattered towers of the Dragon Rock witness our
nuptials and our vows!”
In such words the fairy prince courted the young queen, and while she
sighed at their truth she yielded to their charm. Oh, still may there be
one spot on the earth where the fairy feet may press the legendary soil!
still be there one land where the faith of The Bright Invisible hallows
and inspires! Still glide thou, O majestic and solemn Rhine, among
shades and valleys, from which the wisdom of belief can call the
creations of the younger world!
CHAPTER XI. WHEREIN THE READER IS MADE SPECTATOR WITH THE ENGLISH
FAIRIES OF THE SCENES AND BEINGS THAT ARE BENEATH THE EARTH.
DURING the heat of next day’s noon, Fayzenheim took the English visitors
through the cool caverns that wind amidst the mountains of the Rhine.
There, a thousand wonders awaited the eyes of the fairy queen. I speak
not of the Gothic arch and aisle into which the hollow earth forms
itself, or the stream that rushes with a mighty voice through the dark
chasm, or the silver columns that shoot aloft, worked by the gnomes from
the mines of the mountains of Taunus; but of the strange inhabitants
that from time to time they came upon. They found in one solitary
cell, lined with dried moss, two misshapen elves, of a larger size than
common, with a plebeian working-day aspect, who were chatting noisily
together, and making a pair of boots: these were the Hausmannen or
domestic elves, that dance into tradesmen’s houses of a night, and play
all sorts of undignified tricks. They were very civil to the queen,
for they are good-natured creatures on the whole, and once had many
relations in Scotland. They then, following the course of a noisy
rivulet, came to a hole from which the sharp head of a fox peeped out.
The queen was frightened. “Oh, come on,” said the fox, encouragingly, “I
am one of the fairy race, and many are the gambols we of the brute-elves
play in the German world of romance.” “Indeed, Mr. Fox,” said the
prince, “you only speak the truth; and how is Mr. Bruin?” “Quite well,
my prince, but tired of his seclusion; for indeed our race can do
little or nothing now in the world; and lie here in our old age,
telling stories of the past, and recalling the exploits we did in our
youth,--which, madam, you may see in all the fairy histories in the
prince’s library.”
“Your own love adventures, for instance, Master Fox,” said the prince.
The fox snarled angrily, and drew in his head.
“You have displeased your friend,” said Nymphalin.
“Yes; he likes no allusions to the amorous follies of his youth. Did you
ever hear of his rivalry with the dog for the cat’s good graces?”
“No; that must be very amusing.”
“Well, my queen, when we rest by and by, I will relate to you the
history of the fox’s wooing.”
The next place they came to was a vast Runic cavern, covered with dark
inscriptions of a forgotten tongue; and sitting on a huge stone they
found a dwarf with long yellow hair, his head leaning on his breast, and
absorbed in meditation. “This is a spirit of a wise and powerful race,”
whispered Fayzenheim, “that has often battled with the fairies; but he
is of the kindly tribe.”
Then the dwarf lifted his head with a mournful air; and gazed upon the
bright shapes before him, lighted by the pine torches that the prince’s
attendants carried.
“And what dost thou muse upon, O descendant of the race of Laurin?” said
the prince.
“Upon TIME!” answered the dwarf, gloomily. “I see a River, and its waves
are black, flowing from the clouds, and none knoweth its source. It
rolls deeply on, aye and evermore, through a green valley, which it
slowly swallows up, washing away tower and town, and vanquishing all
things; and the name of the River is TIME.”
Then the dwarf’s head sank on his bosom, and he spoke no more.
The fairies proceeded. “Above us,” said the prince, “rises one of the
loftiest mountains of the Rhine; for mountains are the Dwarf’s home.
When the Great Spirit of all made earth, he saw that the hollows of the
rocks and hills were tenantless, and yet that a mighty kingdom and great
palaces were hid within them,--a dread and dark solitude, but lighted at
times from the starry eyes of many jewels; and there was the treasure of
the human world--gold and silver--and great heaps of gems, and a soil
of metals. So God made a race for this vast empire, and gifted them with
the power of thought, and the soul of exceeding wisdom, so that they
want not the merriment and enterprise of the outer world; but musing
in these dark caves is their delight. Their existence rolls away in the
luxury of thought; only from time to time they appear in the world, and
betoken woe or weal to men,--according to their nature, for they are
divided into two tribes, the benevolent and the wrathful.” While the
prince spoke, they saw glaring upon them from a ledge in the upper rock
a grisly face with a long matted beard. The prince gathered himself up,
and frowned at the evil dwarf, for such it was; but with a wild laugh
the face abruptly disappeared, and the echo of the laugh rang with a
ghastly sound through the long hollows of the earth.
The queen clung to Fayzenheim’s arm. “Fear not, my queen,” said he. “The
evil race have no power over our light and aerial nature; with men only
they war; and he whom we have seen was, in the old ages of the world,
one of the deadliest visitors to mankind.”
But now they came winding by a passage to a beautiful recess in the
mountain empire; it was of a circular shape of amazing height; in the
midst of it played a natural fountain of sparkling waters, and around it
were columns of massive granite, rising in countless vistas, till lost
in the distant shade. Jewels were scattered round, and brightly played
the fairy torches on the gem, the fountain, and the pale silver, that
gleamed at frequent intervals from the rocks. “Here let us rest,” said
the gallant fairy, clapping his hands; “what, ho! music and the feast.”
So the feast was spread by the fountain’s side; and the courtiers
scattered rose-leaves, which they had brought with them, for the prince
and his visitor; and amidst the dark kingdom of the dwarfs broke
the delicate sound of fairy lutes. “We have not these evil beings in
England,” said the queen, as low as she could speak; “they rouse my
fear, but my interest also. Tell me, dear prince, of what nature was the
intercourse of the evil dwarf with man?”
“You know,” answered the prince, “that to every species of living thing
there is something in common; the vast chain of sympathy runs through
all creation. By that which they have in common with the beast of the
field or the bird of the air, men govern the inferior tribes; they
appeal to the common passions of fear and emulation when they tame the
wild steed, to the common desire of greed and gain when they snare
the fishes of the stream, or allure the wolves to the pitfall by the
bleating of the lamb. In their turn, in the older ages of the world, it
was by the passions which men had in common with the demon race that the
fiends commanded or allured them. The dwarf whom you saw, being of that
race which is characterized by the ambition of power and the desire
of hoarding, appealed then in his intercourse with men to the same
characteristics in their own bosoms,--to ambition or to avarice. And
thus were his victims made! But, not now, dearest Nymphalin,” continued
the prince, with a more lively air,--“not now will we speak of those
gloomy beings. Ho, there! cease the music, and come hither all of ye,
to listen to a faithful and homely history of the Dog, the Cat, the
Griffin, and the Fox.”
CHAPTER XII. THE WOOING OF MASTER FOX.*
* In the excursions of the fairies, it is the object of the author
to bring before the reader a rapid phantasmagoria of the various
beings that belong to the German superstitions, so that the work
may thus describe the outer and the inner world of the land of
the Rhine. The tale of the Fox’s Wooing has been composed to
give the English reader an idea of a species of novel not
naturalized amongst us, though frequent among the legends of our
Irish neighbours; in which the brutes are the only characters
drawn,--drawn too with shades of distinction as nice and subtle
as if they were the creatures of the civilized world.
You are aware, my dear Nymphalin, that in the time of which I am about
to speak there was no particular enmity between the various species of
brutes; the dog and the hare chatted very agreeably together, and
all the world knows that the wolf, unacquainted with mutton, had
a particular affection for the lamb. In these happy days, two most
respectable cats, of very old family, had an only daughter. Never was
kitten more amiable or more seducing; as she grew up she manifested so
many charms, that in a little while she became noted as the greatest
beauty in the neighbourhood. Need I to you, dearest Nymphalin, describe
her perfection? Suffice it to say that her skin was of the most delicate
tortoiseshell, that her paws were smoother than velvet, that her
whiskers were twelve inches long at the least, and that her eyes had a
gentleness altogether astonishing in a cat. But if the young beauty
had suitors in plenty during the lives of monsieur and madame, you may
suppose the number was not diminished when, at the age of two years and
a half, she was left an orphan, and sole heiress to all the hereditary
property. In fine, she was the richest marriage in the whole country.
Without troubling you, dearest queen, with the adventures of the rest of
her lovers, with their suit and their rejection, I come at once to the
two rivals most sanguine of success,--the dog and the fox.
Now the dog was a handsome, honest, straightforward, affectionate
fellow. “For my part,” said he, “I don’t wonder at my cousin’s refusing
Bruin the bear, and Gauntgrim the wolf: to be sure they give themselves
great airs, and call themselves ‘_noble_,’ but what then? Bruin is
always in the sulks, and Gauntgrim always in a passion; a cat of any
sensibility would lead a miserable life with them. As for me, I am very
good-tempered when I’m not put out, and I have no fault except that of
being angry if disturbed at my meals. I am young and good-looking, fond
of play and amusement, and altogether as agreeable a husband as a cat
could find in a summer’s day. If she marries me, well and good; she
may have her property settled on herself: if not, I shall bear her no
malice; and I hope I sha’n’t be too much in love to forget that there
are other cats in the world.”
With that the dog threw his tail over his back, and set off to his
mistress with a gay face on the matter.
Now the fox heard the dog talking thus to himself, for the fox was
always peeping about, in holes and corners, and he burst out a laughing
when the dog was out of sight.
“Ho, ho, my fine fellow!” said he; “not so fast, if you please: you’ve
got the fox for a rival, let me tell you.”
The fox, as you very well know, is a beast that can never do anything
without a manoeuvre; and as, from his cunning, he was generally very
lucky in anything he undertook, he did not doubt for a moment that he
should put the dog’s nose out of joint. Reynard was aware that in
love one should always, if possible, be the first in the field; and he
therefore resolved to get the start of the dog and arrive before him
at the cat’s residence. But this was no easy matter; for though Reynard
could run faster than the dog for a little way, he was no match for
him in a journey of some distance. “However,” said Reynard, “those
good-natured creatures are never very wise; and I think I know already
what will make him bait on his way.”
With that, the fox trotted pretty fast by a short cut in the woods, and
getting before the dog, laid himself down by a hole in the earth, and
began to howl most piteously.
The dog, hearing the noise, was very much alarmed. “See now,” said he,
“if the poor fox has not got himself into some scrape! Those cunning
creatures are always in mischief; thank Heaven, it never comes into my
head to be cunning!” And the good-natured animal ran off as hard as he
could to see what was the matter with the fox.
“Oh, dear!” cried Reynard; “what shall I do? What shall I do? My poor
little sister has fallen into this hole, and I can’t get her out; she’ll
certainly be smothered.” And the fox burst out a howling more piteously
than before.
“But, my dear Reynard,” quoth the dog, very simply, “why don’t you go in
after your sister?”
“Ah, you may well ask that,” said the fox; “but, in trying to get in,
don’t you perceive that I have sprained my back and can’t stir? Oh,
dear! what shall I do if my poor little sister is smothered!”
“Pray don’t vex yourself,” said the dog; “I’ll get her out in an
instant.” And with that he forced himself with great difficulty into the
hole.
Now, no sooner did the fox see that the dog was fairly in, than he
rolled a great stone to the mouth of the hole and fitted it so tight,
that the dog, not being able to turn round and scratch against it with
his forepaws, was made a close prisoner.
“Ha, ha!” cried Reynard, laughing outside; “amuse yourself with my poor
little sister, while I go and make your compliments to Mademoiselle the
Cat.”
With that Reynard set off at an easy pace, never troubling his head
what became of the poor dog. When he arrived in the neighbourhood of the
beautiful cat’s mansion, he resolved to pay a visit to a friend of his,
an old magpie that lived in a tree and was well acquainted with all the
news of the place. “For,” thought Reynard, “I may as well know the blind
side of my mistress that is to be, and get round it at once.”
The magpie received the fox with great cordiality, and inquired what
brought him so great a distance from home.
“Upon my word,” said the fox, “nothing so much as the pleasure of seeing
your ladyship and hearing those agreeable anecdotes you tell with so
charming a gra
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