The Jacobins pressed the trial of the king. The mob demanded him as a victim. The Girondists voted with the Jacobins that he was guilty; but they voted to leave the sentence to the determination of the French people, and when they were defeated in this they voted for his death. I am unable to find any thing in the memorials of Madame Roland which shows that she had any sympathy with this. What is written tends rather to show that she was in the very apathy and lassitude of horror. From the time when hercourageous effort to work justice upon the abettors and perpetrators of the massacre failed, her history ceases to be political and becomes personal.
The revolutionary tribunal was reorganized, consisting of twenty judges, a jury, and a public accuser. Merlin of Douai, a consummate jurist, proposed a statute, in every line of which suspicion, treachery, and hate found an arsenal of revenge. It provided that: "Immediately after the publication of this present decree, all suspected persons who are found in the territory of the republic, and who are still at liberty, shall be arrested.
"Are deemed suspected all persona who, by their conduct, writings, or language, have proved themselves partisans of tyranny, federalism, and enemies of liberty;
"Those who can not prove they possess the means of existence, and that they have fully performed all of their duties as citizens;
"Those to whom certificates of citizenship have been refused;
"Those of noble families--fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters, husbands, wives, and agents--who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the Revolution."
The traveler, standing upon the stone seats of the Flavian amphitheater, looks down into the arena, and peoples the Coliseum with the criminals and the innocent martyrs, shut out from hope by its merciless walls and by a populace more merciless, and slain by thousands by wild beasts and swordsmen and spearsmen, to make a Roman holiday. How complacently he felicitates himself upon the assumption that modern times present nothing like this. But less than one hundred years ago, the pen of a lawyer erected in France a statute which inclosed a kingdom with its architectural horror, made one arena of an empire, andin one year drank up more blood than sank into the sands of the Coliseum in centuries.
The revolutionary tribunal was in permanent session. Its trials were summary. It heard with predetermination, and decided without evidence. It was the mere routine formality of death. Proof often consisted solely in the identification of the person whose death had been predetermined. Prostitutes sold acquittals, and revenged themselves by convictions. Paris now ruled France, the Jacobins ruled Paris, and the mob ruled the Jacobins. They had pressed the Girondists, those men of lofty genius and superb eloquence, from their high position into complicity with crimes with which they had no sympathy, and this want of sympathy now became their crime. It was resolved to destroy them. The mob of Paris again came forth. Devilish men and women again crowded the assembly, and even took part in its deliberations. The act of accusation was passed, and twenty-six of the leaders of the Gironde went from their places to the scaffold, where they suffered death sublimely.
Madame Roland was also arrested. Her husband had fled from Paris. She was consigned to the prison of St. Pelagie, and afterwards, after suffering the cruel mockery of a release, she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. This prison was the abiding place of assassins, thieves, and all impurity. It was the anteroom to the scaffold, for incarceration there was an infallible symptom of death. The inmates were crowded into rooms with merciless disregard of their relative characters or antecedents. Madame Roland was first associated with the duchess of Grammont, with a female pick-pocket, with a nun, with an insane woman, and with a street-walker. She finally procured a cell to herself, which she made bloom with flowers. The prison was populous with the most degraded of her sex. Yet she assertedhere the same marvelous ascendancy which she had always possessed over her associates. The obscene outcries of lost women died away when she approached. Her cell was an ark of safety for any dove seeking refuge from that deluge of human sin. When she went into the courtyard the lost of her own sex gathered around her with reverence, as around a tutelary and interceding angel, the same women who inflicted upon Madame Du Barry, that princess of their caste, every torment which the malice of their sex could inspire. Inmates and visitors crowded to the door of her cell, and she spoke to them through its iron bars with eloquence, which increased as inspiring death drew near, of liberty, country, equality, and of better days for France, but when they went away she would look through her window to the sky, and, thinking of her hunted husband and sequestered little daughter, cry and moan like the simplest wife and mother. Then she would send by surreptitious conveyance, letters to refugee statesmen, which discussed the political situation as calmly as if written upon the work-table of a secure and peaceful home. Calumny now busied itself to defile her. Hebert, vilest of editors, flung the ordure of Pere Duchesne, vilest of newspapers, upon this spotless woman, soon to be a saint, and sent the newsmen to cry the disgusting charges under her prison windows, so that she heard them rendered in all the villainies of a language whose under-drains have sources of vileness filthier than any other speech of man. She did not fear death, but she did fear calumny. She had never delighted in any public display of her enormous intellectual powers, and she had never made any such display. She had fixed the sentiment of Lyons by an anonymous newspaper article, of which sixty thousand copies had been bought in one day. She had written to the king a letter which drove her husband from power,and which, when read by the people, compelled the king to restore him. She had written a dispatch to the pope, claiming rights for certain French in Rome, in which the sanctity of his office and the dignity of her country was respected, appealed to, and asserted. It is said that the state papers were hers which persuaded William Pitt to abstain so long from intervention in the affairs of France, in that time of English terror and hope, which furnished arguments to Fox, and which drew from Burke those efforts of massive reason and gorgeous imagination which will endure as long as the language itself. The counsel by which she had disentangled the perplexity of wisest men had been repeated by them to applauding senates in tones less eloquent than those by which they had been received, and triumph had followed. In none of these efforts did she avow herself. She shrank from the honors which solicited her, though the world knew that they came from her just as the world knows that moon and planets shine with the reflected light of a hidden sun. But now, when thus assailed, she resolved to speak personally and for herself. And so, sitting in her cell, she wrote in concealment and sent out by trusty hands, in cantos, that autobiography in which she appealed to posterity, and by which posterity has been convinced. She traced her career from earliest childhood down to the very brink of the grave into which she was looking. Her intellectual, affectional and mental history are all there written with a hand as steady and a mind as serene as though she were at home, with her baby sleeping in its cradle by her side. Here are found history, philosophy, political science, poetry, and ethics as they were received and given out again by one of the most receptive and imparting minds ever possessed by woman. She knew that husband, home, child, and friends were not for her any more, and that very soon she was to see the last of earthfrom beside the headsman and from the block, and yet she turned from all regret and fear, and summoned the great assize of posterity, "of foreign nations and the next ages," to do her justice. There was no sign of fear. She looked as calmly on what she knew she must soon undergo as the spirit released into never-ending bliss looks back upon the corporeal trammels from which it has just earned its escape.
There are those who believe that a woman can not be great as she was and still be pure. These ghouls of history will to the end of time dig into the graves where such queens lie entombed. This woman has slept serenely for nearly a century. Sweet oblivion has dimmed with denial and forgetfulness the obloquy which hunted her in her last days. Tears such as are shed for vestal martyrs have been shed for her, and for all her faults she has the condonation of universal sorrow. Nothing but the evil magic of sympathetic malice can restore these calumnies, and even then they quickly fade away in the sunlight of her life. Nothing can touch her further. Dismiss them with the exorcism of Carlyle, grown strangely tender and elegiac here. "Breathe not thy poison breath! Evil speech! That soul is taintless; clear as the mirror sea." She was brought to trial. The charge against her was, "That there has existed a horrible conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the French people; that Marie Jeanne Phlipon, wife of Jean Marie Roland has been one of the abettors or accomplices of that conspiracy." This was the formula by which this woman was killed, and it simply meant that the Gironde had existed and that she had sympathized with it.
She was racked with interrogations, and returned to the prison, weeping at the infernal imputations which they cast upon her womanhood. On the day of her final trial shedressed herself in spotless white, and let fall the voluminous masses of her brown, abundant hair. She was asked to betray her husband by disclosing his hiding place. Her answer is full of wifely loyalty and dignity--"Whether I know it or not I neither ought nor will say."
There was absolutely no evidence against her except of her affiliations with the Girondists. The mockery ended by her condemnation to death within twenty-four hours, and this Iphigenia of France went doomed back to her cell. Her return was awaited with dreadful anxiety by her associates in confinement, who hoped against hope for her safe deliverance. As she passed through the massive doors, she smiled, and drew her hand knife-like across her neck, and then there went up a wail from all assembled there, the wail of titled women, of sacred nuns, of magdalens and thieves, a dirge of inconsolable sorrow, of humanity weeping for its best beloved child.
Late in the afternoon of November 8, 1693, the rude cart which was to bear her to the guillotine received her. She was dressed in white; her hair fell like a mantle to her knees. The chilly air and her own courage brought back to her prison-blanched cheek the rosy hues of youth. She spoke words of divine patience to the crowd which surged around her on her way and reviled her. With a few low words she raised the courage of a terror-stricken old man who took with her the same last journey, and made him smile. As the hours wore into twilight, she passed the home of her youth, and perhaps longed to become a little child again and enter there and be at rest. At the foot of the scaffold she asked for pen and paper to bequeath to posterity the thoughts which crowded upon her; they were refused, and thus was one of the books of the sibyls lost. She bowed to the great statue of Liberty near by, exclaiming,"O Liberté! comme on t' a jouée!"[2]and gave her majestic form to the headsman to be bound upon the plank.
The knife fell, and the world darkened upon the death of the queenliest woman who ever lived and loved.--EX-GOVERNOR C.K. DAVIS,of Minnesota.
What though the triumph of thy fond forecastingLingers till earth is fading from thy sight?Thy part with Him whose arms are everlasting,Is not forsaken in a hopeless night.Paul was begotten in the death of Stephen;Fruitful through time shall be that precious blood:No morning yet has ever worn to evenAnd missed the glory of its crimson flood.There is a need of all the blood of martyrs,Forevermore the eloquence of God;And there is need of him who never bartersHis patience in that desert way the Master trod.What mean the strange, hard words, "through tribulation?"O Man of sorrows, only Thou canst tell,And such as in Thy life's humiliation,Have oft been with Thee, ay, have known Thee well.The failures of the world are God's successes,Although their coming be akin to pain;And frowns of Providence are but caresses,Prophetic of the rest sought long in vain.
Baron Muffling relates of the Duke of Wellington, that that great general remained at the Duchess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful." The baron, who is a very good authority on the subject, having previously proved that every plan was laid in the duke's mind, and Quatre Bras and Waterloo fully detailed, we may comprehend the value of the sentence. It was the bold, trusting heart of the hero that made him cheerful. He showed himself cheerful, too, at Waterloo. He was never very jocose; but on that memorable 18th of June he showed a symptom of it. He rode along the line and cheered men by his look and his face, and they too cheered him. But, when the danger was over--when the 21,000 brave men of his own and the Prussian army lay stiffening in death--the duke, who was so cheerful in the midst of his danger, covered his face with his hands and wept. He asked for that friend, and he was slain; for this, and a bullet had pierced his heart. The men who had devoted themselves to death for their leader and their country had been blown to pieces, or pierced with lances, or hacked with sabers, and lay, like Ponsonby covered with thirteen wounds, upon the ground. Well might the duke weep, iron though he was. "There is nothing," he writes, "nothing in the world so dreadful as a battle lost, unless itbe such a battle won. Nothing can compensate for the dreadful cruelty, carnage, and misery of the scene, save the reflection on the public good which may arise from it."
Forty years' peace succeeded the great battle. Forty years of prosperity, during which he himself went honored to his tomb, rewarded the constant brave look and tongue which answered his men, when he saw the whole side of a square blown in, with "Hard work, gentlemen! They are pounding away! We must see who can pound the longest." It is not too much to say that the constant cheerfulness of the Duke of Wellington was one great element of success in the greatest battle ever fought, one of the fifteen decisive battles in the world, great in the number engaged, greater in the slaughter, greatest in the results. But all commanders ought to be cheerful. Gloomy looks do not do in the army. A set of filibusters or pirates may wear looks and brows as black as the sticking-plasters boots that their representatives are dressed in at the minor theaters; but a soldier or a sailor should be, and as a rule is, the most cheerful of fellows, doing his duty in the trench or the storm, dying when the bullet comes, but living like a hero the while. Look, for instance, at the whole-hearted cheerfulness of Raleigh, when with his small English ships he cast himself against the navies of Spain; or at Xenophon, conducting back from an inhospitable and hostile country, and through unknown paths, his ten thousand Greeks; or Cæsar, riding up and down the banks of the Rubicon, sad enough belike when alone, but at the head of his men cheerful, joyous, well dressed, rather foppish, in fact, his face shining with good humor as with oil. Again, Nelson, in the worst of dangers, was as cheerful as the day. He had even a rough but quiet humor in him just as he carried his coxswain behind him to bundle the swords of the Spanish and Frenchcaptains under his arm. He could clap his telescope to his blind eye, and say, "Gentlemen, I can not make out the signal," when the signal was adverse to his wishes, and then go in and win, in spite of recall. Fancy the dry laughs which many an old sea-dog has had over that cheerful incident. How the story lights up the dark page of history! Then there was Henry of Navarre, lion in war, winner of hearts, bravest of the brave, who rode down the ranks at Ivry when Papist and Protestant were face to face, when more than his own life and kingdom were at stake, and all the horrors of religious war were loosened and unbound, ready to ravage poor, unhappy France. That beaming, hopeful countenance won the battle, and is a parallel to the brave looks of Queen Elizabeth when she cheered her Englishmen at Tilbury.
But we are not all soldiers or sailors, although, too, our Christian profession hath adopted the title of soldiers in the battle of life. It is all very well to cite great commanders who, in the presence of danger, excited by hope, with the eyes of twenty thousand men upon them, are cheerful and happy; but what is that to the solitary author, the poor artist, the governess, the milliner, the shoemaker, the factory-girl, they of the thousand persons in profession or trade who are given to murmur, and who think life so hard and gloomy and wretched that they can not go through it with a smile on their faces and despair in their hearts? What are examples and citations to them? "Hecuba!" cries out poor, melancholy, morbid Hamlet, striking on a vein of thought, "what's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" Much.
We all have trials; but it is certain that good temper and cheerfulness will make us bear them more easily than any thing else. "Temper," said one of our bishops, "is nine-tenthsof Christianity." We do not live now in the Middle Ages. We can not think that the sect of Flagellants, who whipped themselves till the blood ran into their shoes, and pulled uncommonly long faces, were the best masters of philosophy. "True godliness is cheerful as the day," wrote Cowper, himself melancholy-mad enough; and we are to remember that the precept of the Founder of our faith, that when we fast we are to anoint our countenances and not to seem to fast, enjoins a certain liveliness of face. Sydney Smith, when a poor curate at Foster-le-Clay, a dreary, desolate place, wrote: "I am resolved to like it, and to reconcile myself to it, which is more manly than to fancy myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post of being thrown away, or being desolated, and such like trash." And he acted up to this; said his prayers, made his jokes, did his duty, and, Upon fine mornings, used to draw up the blinds of his parlor, open the window, and "glorify the room," as he called the operation, with sunshine. But all the sunshine without was nothing to the sunshine within the heart. It was that which made him go through life so bravely and so well; it is that, too, which renders his life a lesson to us all.
We must also remember that the career of a poor curate is not the most brilliant in the world. That of an apprentice boy has more fun in it; that of a milliner's girl has more merriment and fewer depressing circumstances. To hear always the same mistrust of Providence, to see poverty, to observe all kinds of trial, to witness death-bed scenes--this is not the most enlivening course of existence, even if a clergyman be a man of mark and of station. But there was one whose station was not honored, nay, even by some despised, and who had sorer trials than Sydney Smith. His name is well known in literature; and his writings and hisexample still teach us in religion. This was Robert Hall, professor of a somber creed in a somber flat country, as flat and "deadly-lively," as they say, as need be. To add to difficulties and troubles, the minister was plagued with about as painful an illness as falls to the lot of humanity to bear. He had fought with infidelity and doubt; he had refused promotion, because he would do his duty where it had pleased God to place him; next he had to show how well he could bear pain. In all his trials he had been cheerful, forcible, natural, and straightforward. In this deep one he preserved the same character. Forced to throw himself down and writhe upon the floor in his paroxysms of pain, he rose up, livid with exhaustion, and with the sweat of anguish on his brow, without a murmur.
In the whole library of brave anecdote there is no tale of heroism which, to us, beats this. It very nearly equals that of poor, feeble Latimer, cheering up his fellow-martyr as he walked to the stake, "Be of good cheer, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a fire in England as by God's grace shall not be readily put out." The very play upon the torture is brave, yet pathetic. Wonderful, too, was the boldness and cheerfulness of another martyr, Rowland Taylor, who, stripped to his shirt, was forced to walk toward the stake, who answered the jeers of his persecutors and the tears of his friends with the same noble constant smile, and, meeting two of his very old parishioners who wept, stopped and cheeredthemas he went, adding, that he went on his way rejoicing.
Heroes and martyrs are perhaps too high examples, for they may have, or rather poor, common, every-day humanity will think they have, a kind of high-pressure sustainment. Let us look to our own prosaic days; let us mark the constant cheerfulness and manliness of Dr. Maginn, or thatmuch higher heroic bearing of Tom Hood. We suppose that every body knows that Hood's life was not of that brilliant, sparkling, fizzing, banging, astonishing kind which writers such as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, and some others, depict as the general life of literary men. He did not, like Byron, "jump up one morning, and find himself famous." All the libraries were not asking for his novel, though a better was not written; countesses and dairy-women did not beg his autograph. His was a life of constant hard work, constant trial or disappointment, and constant illness, enlivened only by a home affection and a cheerfulness as constant as his pain. When slowly, slowly dying, he made cheerful fun as often almost as he said his prayers. He was heard, after, perhaps, being almost dead, to laugh gently to himself in the still night, when his wife or children, who were the watchers, thought him asleep. Many of the hard lessons of fate he seasoned, as old Latimer did his sermons, with a pun, and he excused himself from sending more "copy" for his magazine by a sketch, the "Editor's Apologies," a rough pen-and-ink drawing of physic-bottles and leeches. Yet Hood had not only his own woes to bear, but felt for others. No one had a more tender heart--few men a more catholic and Christian sympathy for the poor--than the writer of the "Song of the Shirt."
What such men as these have done, every one else surely can do. Cheerfulness is a Christian duty; moroseness, dulness, gloominess, as false, and wrong, and cruel as they are unchristian. We are too far advanced now in the light of truth to go back into the Gothic and conventual gloom of the Middle Ages, any more than we could go back to the exercises of the Flagellants and the nonsense of the pre-Adamites. All whole-hearted peoples have been lively and bustling, noisy almost, in their progress, pushing, energetic,broad in shoulder, strong in lung, loud in voice, of free brave color, bold look, and bright eyes. They are the cheerful people in the world--
"Active doers, noble livers--strong to labors sure to conquer;"
and soon pass in the way of progress the more quiet and gloomy of their fellows. That some of this cheerfulness may be simply animal is true, and that a man may be a dullard and yet sit and "grin like a Cheshire cat;" but we are not speaking of grinning. Laughter is all very well; is a healthy, joyous, natural impulse; the true mark of superiority between man and beast, for no inferior animal laughs; but we are not writing of laughter, but of that continued even tone of spirits, which lies in the middle zone between frantic merriment and excessive despondency. Cheerfulness arises from various causes: from health; but it is not dependent upon health;--from good fortune; but it does not arise solely from that;--from honor, and position, and a tickled pride and vanity; but, as we have seen, it is quite independent of these. The truth is, it is a brave habit of the mind; a prime proof of wisdom; capable of being acquired, and of the very greatest value.
A cheerful man is pre-eminently a useful man. He does not "cramp his mind, nor take half views of men and things." He knows that there is much misery, but that misery is not the rule of life. He sees that in every state people may be cheerful; the lambs skip, birds sing and fly joyously, puppies play, kittens are full of joyance, the whole air full of careering and rejoicing insects, that everywhere the good outbalances the bad, and that every evil that there is has its compensating balm. Then the brave man, as our German cousins say, possesses the world, whereas the melancholy man does not even possess his own share of it. Exercise,or continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do our duty. Cheerful people live long in our memory. We remember joy more readily than sorrow, and always look back with tenderness on the brave and cheerful. Autolycus repeats the burden of an old song with the truth that "a merry heart goes all the day, but your sad ones tires a mile a!" and what he says any one may notice, not only in ourselves, but in the inferior animals also. A sulky dog, and a bad-tempered horse, wear themselves out with half the labor that kindly creatures do. An unkindly cow will not give down her milk, and a sour sheep will not fatten; nay, even certain fowls and geese, to those who observe, will evidence temper--good or bad.
We can all cultivate our tempers, and one of the employments of some poor mortals is to cultivate, cherish, and bring to perfection, a thoroughly bad one; but we may be certain that to do so is a very gross error and sin, which, like all others, brings its own punishment, though, unfortunately, it does not punish itself only. If he "to whom God is pleasant is pleasant to God," the reverse also holds good; and certainly the major proposition is true with regard to man. Addison says of cheerfulness, that it lightens sickness, poverty, affliction; converts ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and renders deformity itself agreeable; and he says no more than the truth. "Give us, therefore, O! give us"--let us cry with Carlyle--"the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time; he will do it better; he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible offatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their appointed skies." "Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness! altogether past calculation the powers of its endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful must be uniformly joyous--a spirit all sunshine--graceful from very gladness--beautiful because bright." Such a spirit is within every body's reach. Let us get out into the light of things. The morbid man cries out that there is always enough wrong in the world to make a man miserable. Conceded; but wrong is ever being righted; there is always enough that is good and right to make us joyful. There is ever sunshine somewhere; and the brave man will go on his way rejoicing, content to look forward if under a cloud, not bating one jot of heart or hope if for a moment cast down; honoring his occupation, whatever it may be; rendering even rags respectable by the way he wears them; and not only being happy himself, but causing the happiness of others.
The father of Harold, the last Saxon king of England, was named Godwin, and was the first great English statesman. It was from him that Harold in a great measure inherited his vigor and power, though, indeed, he came altogether of a noble race, both by lineage and character, for his mother was a daughter of Canute the Great.
All the English loved Harold; he was strong and generous, and a better counselor than Godwin, his father, in many ways. At first he never sought any thing for himself; but as time went on, and he found how he was obeyed, and how he was beloved, how the whole country turned her eyes to him as the fittest king when Edward the Confessor should be gone, he also took the same idea into his mind, and gave himself to rule, to teach, and to act as one who should by and by be king.
Edward's queen, Edith, was Harold's sister; but there was another Edith, who influenced Harold more than any one else in many ways. From his boyhood he and she had played together, and they grew up, never so much as thinking that a time would come when they would separate.
The more Harold saw her the more he felt he should like to ask her to be his wife, and have her always with him; but there were many things which made that impossible. And then England required Harold. If he thought only of his own happiness his country must suffer. Thegreat nobles wished him to establish the kingdom by marrying the daughter of one of the most powerful lords; this would connect the people and the land more closely, and prevent quarrels and divisions; and the government required the whole of Harold's services, and the people required his watchfulness, his thought, his care, his presence.
All his life through he had consulted Edith, and now at this terrible moment he consulted her again. He stood before her, and in great trouble and agony of spirit told her just how things were, scarcely daring to look at the woman he loved; for if he looked at her, England, her greatness and her needs, all melted away, and he saw nothing but a beaming vision of a quiet, beloved home, free from the storms of the great world outside.
But Edith too was unselfish, pure and good; so she put all thought of personal happiness away, and putting her hand on his shoulder, said, "Never, O Harold, did I feel so proud of thee, for Edith could not love thee as she doth, and will till the grave clasp her, if thou didst not love England more than Edith." So these two separated.
His whole energy was given to his king and his country. He had no great love for the monks; but he sought out the good and noble ones, put power into their hands, and gave them his support in ruling wisely and well. The Abbey of Waltham had fallen into almost complete decay; he chose two humbly born men, renowned for the purity and benevolence of their lives, and gave to them the charge of selecting a new brotherhood there, which he largely endowed.
At last Edward passed quietly away, and with one accord Harold, the beloved, was chosen king and crowned.
Over the sea dwelt William, duke of the Normans, With no careless ear did he hear that Edward was dead Edward dead! Edward! Why, Edward, in a moment offriendship, had promised the English throne to him--had even, William asserted, left it him in will; therefore his rage was great when he heard that Harold was not only proclaimed and crowned king, but was ready to defend his claim by battle sooner than yield. William was a man of power and iron will; he forced his reluctant Normans to listen to his complaint, equipped an army, and sailed for Britain. On came the queer little ships of war, nearer and nearer to England's white, free cliffs, and cast anchor in Pevensey Bay.
William, eager and impatient, sprang from his ship; but his foot slipping, he fell, to rise again with both his hands full of earth, which he showed to his scared soldiers in triumph, crying:
"So do I grasp the earth of a new country."
Meanwhile Harold had gathered his forces, and they were assembled on Senlac Hill, an advantageous position. He himself was in the center, his brave brother Gurth at his right hand.
A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle, which raged the whole day, victory now leaning to the English and now to the Normans. There was a cry that the duke was killed. "I live!" he shouted, "and by God's help will conquer yet!" And tearing off his helmet he rushed into the thickest of the battle, and aimed right at the standard. Round that standard the last sharp, long struggle took place. Harold, Gurth, all the greatest who still survived, met there. With his tremendous battle-ax the king did mighty slaughter, till, looking upward as he swung his ax with both hands, a Norman arrow pierced his eye, and he fell.
"Fight on!" he gasped. "Conceal my death--England to the rescue!" One instant he sprang to his feet, and thenfell back--lifeless. One by one the other noble guardians fell around him, till only Gurth was left, brave chief and last man, with no thought of surrender, though all was gone and lost.
"Spare him! spare the brave!" shouted one; but the brave heart was already pierced, and he sank beside his king and brother. So fell the last of the Saxon kings, and so arose the Norman race.
Long did they search the battlefield for Harold's body, disfigured by wounds and loss of blood, but long did they seek it in vain, till a woman whose toil had never ceased burst into a sharp cry over a lifeless form. It was Edith, who with many another woman had watched the battle. The body was too changed to be recognized even by its nearest friends; but beneath his heart was punctured in old Saxon letters "Edith," and just below, in characters more fresh, "England," the new love he had taken when duty bade him turn from Edith; which recalls the lines of Lovelace to Lucasta:
"Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,That from the nunneryOf thy chaste breast and quiet mindTo war and arms I fly.True, a new mistress now I chase,The first foe of the field;And with a stronger faith embraceA sword, a horse, a shield.Yet this inconstancy is suchAs you too shall adore;I could not love thee, dear, so muchLoved I not not honor more."
Illustration: PETER COOPER.PETER COOPER.
Barzillai, of sacred history, was a very old man, a very kind man, a very affectionate man, a very rich man of the tenth century before Christ, a type of our American philanthropist, Peter Cooper, in the nineteenth century after Christ. When I see Barzillai, from his wealthy country seat at Rogelim, coming out to meet David's retreating army, and providing them with flour and corn and mattresses, it makes me think of the hearty response of our modern philanthropist in time of trouble and disaster, whether individual, municipal, or national. The snow of his white locks has melted from our sight, and the benediction of his genial face has come to its long amen. But his influence halted not a half-second for his obsequies to finish, but goes right on without change, save that of augmentation, for in the great sum of a useful life death is a multiplication instead of subtraction, and the tombstone, instead of being the goal of the race, is only the starting point. What means this rising up of all good men, with hats off, in reverence to one who never wielded a sword or delivered masterly oration or stood in senatorial place? Neither general, nor lord, nor governor, nor President. The LL. D., which a university bestowed, did not stick to him. The word mister, as a prefix, or the word esquire, as a suffix, seemed a superfluity. He was, in all Christendom, plain Peter Cooper. Why,then, all the flags at half-mast, and the resolutions of common council, and the eulogium of legislatures, and the deep sighs from multitudes who have no adequate way to express their bereavement?
First, he was in some respects the father of American philanthropies. There have been far larger sums donated to the public since this man founded Cooper Institute, but I think that hundreds of the charities were born of his example. Sometimes a father will have a large family of children who grow up to be larger than himself. When that six-storied temple of instruction was built on Fourth Avenue and Seventh Street by Mr. Cooper, at an expense of $630,000, and endowed by him with $150,000, you must remember $100,000 was worth as much as $500,000 now, and that millionaires, who are so common now that you hardly stop to look at them, were a rare spectacle. Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor, of the olden time, would in our day almost excite the sympathy of some of our railroad magnates. The nearly $800,000, which built and endowed Cooper Institute, was as much as $3,000,000 or $5,000,000 now. But there are institutions in our day that have cost many times more dollars in building and endowment which have not accomplished more than a fraction of the good done by this munificence of 1857. This gift brooded charities all over the land. This mothered educational institutions. This gave glorious suggestion to many whose large fortune was hitherto under the iron grasp of selfishness. If the ancestral line of many an asylum or infirmary or college or university were traced back far enough, you would learn that Peter Cooper was the illustrious progenitor. Who can estimate the effect of such an institution, standing for twenty-six years, saying to all the millions of people passing up and down the greatthoroughfares: "I am here to bless and educate, without money and without price, all the struggling ones who come under my wings?" That institution has for twenty-six years been crying shame on miserliness and cupidity. That free reading-room has been the inspiration of five hundred free reading-rooms. Great reservoir of American beneficence!
Again, Peter Cooper showed what a wise thing it is for a man to be his own executor. How much better is ante-mortem charity than post-mortem beneficence. Many people keep all their property for themselves till death, and then make good institutions their legatees. They give up the money only because they have to. They would take it all with them if they only had three or four stout pockets in their shroud. Better late than never, but the reward shall not be as great as the reward of those who make charitable contribution while yet they have power to keep their money. Charity, in last will and testament, seems sometimes to be only an attempt to bribe Charon, the ferryman, to land the boat in celestial rather than infernal regions. Mean as sin when they disembark from the banks of this world, they hope to be greeted as benefactors when they come up the beach on the other side. Skinflints when they die, they hope to have the reception of a George Peabody. Besides that, how often donations by will and testament fail of their final destination. The surrogate's courts are filled with legal quarrels. If a philanthropist has any pride of intellect, and desires to help Christian institutions, he had better bestow the gift before death, for the trouble is, if he leaves any large amount to Christian institutions, the courts will be appealed to to prove he was crazy. They will bring witnesses to prove that for a long time he has been becoming imbecile, and as almost every one of positive nature has idiosyncrasies, these idiosyncrasies will be brought out on thetrial, and ventilated and enlarged and caricatured, and the man who had mind enough to make $1,000,000, and heart enough to remember needy institutions, will be proved a fool. If he have a second wife, the children of the first wife will charge him with being unduly influenced. Many a man who, when he made his will, had more brain than all his household put together, has been pronounced a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. Be your own executor. Do not let the benevolent institutions of the country get their chief advantage from your last sickness and death. How much better, like Peter Cooper, to walk through the halls you have built for others and see the young men being educated by your beneficence, and to get the sublime satisfaction of your own charities! I do not wonder that Barzillai, the wealthy Gileadite, lived to be eighty, for he stood in the perpetual sunshine of his beneficence. I do not wonder that Peter Cooper, the modern Barzillai, lived to be ninety-two years of age, for he felt the healthful reaction of helping others. Doing good was one of the strongest reasons of his longevity. There is many a man with large estate behind him who calls up his past dollars as a pack of hounds to go out and hunt up one more dollar before he dies. Away away the hunter and his hounds for that last dollar! Hotter and hotter the chase. Closer on the track and closer. Whip up and spur on the steed! The old man just ahead, and all the pack of hounds close after him. Now they are coming in at the death, that last dollar only a short distance ahead. The old hunter, with panting breath and pale cheek and outstretched arm, clutches for it as it turns on its track, but, missing it, keeps on till the exhausted dollar plunges into a hole and burrows and burrows deep; and the old hunter, with both hands, claws at the earth, and claws deeper down, till the burrowed embankment gives way, andhe rolls over into his own grave. We often talk of old misers. There are but few old misers. The most of them are comparatively young. Avarice massacres more than a war. In contrast, behold the philanthropist in the nineties, and dying of a cold caught in going to look after the affairs of the institution he himself founded, and which has now about two thousand five hundred persons a day in its reading-rooms and libraries, and two thousand students in its evening schools.
Again, Peter Cooper has shown the world a good way of settling the old quarrel between capital and labor, the altercation between rich and poor. There are two ways in which this conflict can never be settled. One is the violent suppression of the laboring classes, and the other the violent assault of the rich. This is getting to be the age of dynamite--dynamite under the Kremlin, dynamite in proximity to Parliament House and railroad track, dynamite near lordly mansions, dynamite in Ireland, dynamite in England, dynamite in America. The rich are becoming more exclusive, and the poor more irate. I prescribe for the cure of this mighty evil of the world a large allopathic dose of Peter Cooperism. You never heard of dynamite in Cooper Institute. You never heard of any one searching the cellar of that man's house for a keg of dynamite. At times of public excitement, when prominent men had their houses guarded, there were no sentinels needed at his door. The poorest man with a hod on his shoulder carrying brick up a wall begrudged not the philanthropist his carriage as he rode by. No one put the torch to Peter Cooper's glue factory. When on some great popular occasion the masses assembled in the hall of Cooper Institute and its founder came on the platform, there were many hard hands that clapped in vigorous applause. Let the rich stretch forthtoward the great masses of England, Ireland, and America as generous and kind a hand as that of Peter Cooper, and the age of dynamite will end. What police can not do, and shot and shell can not do, and strongest laws severely executed can not do, and armies can not do, will yet be accomplished by something that I see fit to baptize as Peter Cooperism. I hail the early twilight of that day when a man of millions shall come forth and say: "There are seventy thousand destitute children in New York, and here I put up and endow out of my fortune a whole line of institutions to take care of them; here are vast multitudes in filthy and unventilated tenement-houses, for whom I will build a whole block of residences at cheap rents; here are nations without Christ, and I turn my fortune inside out to send them flaming evangels; there shall be no more hunger, and no more sickness, and no more ignorance, and no more crime, if I can help it." That spirit among the opulent of this country and other countries would stop contention, and the last incendiary's torch would be extinguished, and the last dagger of assassination would go to slicing bread for poor children, and the last pound of dynamite that threatens death would go to work in quarries to blast foundation-stones for asylums and universities and churches. May the spirit of Peter Cooper and Wm. E. Dodge come down on all the bank stock and government securities and railroad companies and great business houses of America!
Again, this Barzillai of the nineteenth century shows us a more sensible way of monumental and epitaphal commemoration. It is natural to want to be remembered. It would not be a pleasant thought to us or to any one to feel that the moment you are out of the world you would be forgotten. If the executors of Peter Cooper should build on his grave a monument that would cost $20,000,000, itwould not so well commemorate him as that monument at the junction of Third and Fourth Avenues, New York. How few people would pass along the silent sepulcher as compared with those great numbers that will ebb and flow around Cooper Institute in the ages to come! Of the tens of thousands to be educated there, will there be one so stupid as not to know who built it, and what a great heart he had, and how he struggled to achieve a fortune, but always mastered that fortune, and never allowed the fortune to master him? What is a monument of Aberdeen granite beside a monument of intellect and souls? What is an epitaph of a few words cut by a sculptor's chisel beside the epitaph of coming generations and hundreds writing his praise? Beautiful and adorned beyond all the crypts and catacombs and shrines of the dead! But the superfluous and inexcusable expense of catafalque and sarcophagus and tumulus and necropolis the world over, put into practical help, would have sent intelligence into every dark mind and provided a home for every wanderer. The pyramids of Egypt, elevated at vast expense, were the tombs of kings--their names now obliterated. But the monuments of good last forever. After "Old Mortality" has worn out his chisel in reviving the epitaphs on old tombstones, the names of those who have helped others will be held in everlasting remembrance. The fires of the Judgment Day will not crumble off one of the letters. The Sabbath-school teacher builds her monument in the heavenly thrones of her converted scholars. Geo. Müller's monument is the orphan-houses of England. Handel's monument was his "Hallelujah Chorus." Peabody's monument, the library of his native village and the schools for educating the blacks in the South. They who give or pray for a church have their monument in all that sacred edifice ever accomplishes.John Jay had his monument in free America. Wilberforce his monument in the piled up chains of a demolished slave trade. Livingstone shall have his monument in regenerated Africa. Peter Cooper has his monument in all the philanthropies which for the last quarter of a century he encouraged by his one great practical effort for the education of the common people. That is a fame worth having. That is a style of immortality for which any one without degradation may be ambitious. Fill all our cities with such monuments till the last cripple has his limb straightened, and the last inebriate learns the luxury of cold water, and the last outcast comes home to his God, and the last abomination is extirpated, and "Paradise Lost" has become "Paradise Regained."
But notice, also, that the longest life-path has a terminus. What a gauntlet to run--the accidents, the epidemics, the ailments of ninety-two years! It seemed as if this man would live on forever. His life reached from the administration of George Washington to that of President Arthur. But the liberal hand is closed, and the beaming eye is shut, and the world-encompassing heart is still. When he was at my house, I felt I was entertaining a king. But the king is dead, and we learn that the largest volume of life has its last chapter, its last paragraph, and its last word. What are ninety-two years compared with the years that open the first page of the future? For that let us be ready. Christ came to reconstruct us for usefulness, happiness, and heaven.
I know not the minutiae of Peter Cooper's religious opinions. Some men are worse than their creed, and some are better. The grandest profession of Jesus Christ is a life devoted to the world's elevation and betterment. A man may have a membership in all the orthodox Churches in Christendom,and yet, if he be mean and selfish and careless about the world's condition, he is no Christian; while, on the other hand, though he may have many peculiarities of belief, if he live for others more than for himself, he is Christ-like, and, I think, he must be a Christian. But let us remember that the greatest philanthropist of the ages was Jesus Christ, and the greatest charity ever known was that which gave not its dollars, but its blood, for the purchase of the world's deliverance. Standing in the shadow of Peter Cooper's death, I pray God that all the resources of America may be consecrated. We are coming on to times of prosperity that this country never imagined. Perhaps here and there a few years of recoil or set-back, but God only can estimate the wealth that is about to roll into the lap of this nation. Between five years ago, when I visited the South, and my recent visit, there has been a change for the better that amounts to a resurrection. The Chattahoochee is about to rival the Merrimac in manufactures, and the whole South is being filled with the dash of water-wheels and the rattle of spindles. Atlanta has already $6,000,000 invested in manufactures. The South has gone out of politics into business. The West, from its inexhaustible mines, is going to, disgorge silver and gold, and pour the treasure all over the nation. May God sanctify the coming prosperity of the people. The needs are as awful as the opulence is to be tremendous. In 1880 there were 5,000,000 people over ten years of age in the United States that could not read, and over 6,000,000 who could not write, and nearly 2,000,000 of the voters. We want 5,000 Cooper Institutes and churches innumerable, and just one spiritual awakening, but that reaching from the St. Lawrence to Key West, and from Barnegat Light-house to the Golden Gate. We can all somewhere be felt in theundertaking. I like the sentiment and the rhythm of some anonymous poet, who wrote:
"When I am dead and gone,And the mold upon my breast,Say not that he did well or ill,Only 'He did his best.'"--DR. TALMAGE.
GOODNESS.
Goodness needs no lure:All compensations are in her enshrined,Whatever things are right and fair and pure,Wealth of the heart and mind.Failure and Success,The Day and Night of every life below,Are but the servants of her blessedness,That come and spend and go.Life is her reward,A life brim-full, in every day's employ,Of sunshine, inspiration, every wordAnd syllable of joy.Heaven to thee is known,If Goodness in the robes of common earthBecomes a presence thou canst call thine own,To warm thy heart and hearth.Clothed in flesh and blood,She flits about me every blessed day,The incarnation of sweet womanhood;And age brings no decay.