For nearly three years Will and Marjory continued on these terms, seeing each other once or twice a week without any word of love between them; and for all that time I believe Will was nearly as happy as a man can be. He rather stinted himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again, as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road, whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the valley between sloping fir woods, with a triangular snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and moralize in before returning homewards; and the peasants got so much into the habit of finding him there in the twilight that they gave it the name of "Will o' the Mill's Corner."
At the end of the three years Marjory played him a sad trick by suddenly marrying somebody else. Will kept his countenance bravely, and merely remarked that, for as little as he knew of women, he had acted very prudently in not marrying her himself three years before. She plainly knew very little of her own mind, and, in spite of a deceptivemanner, was as fickle and flighty as the rest of them. He had to congratulate himself on an escape, he said, and would take a high opinion of his own wisdom in consequence. But at heart, he was reasonably displeased, moped a good deal for a month or two, and fell away in flesh, to the astonishment of his serving-lads.
It was perhaps a year after this marriage that Will was awakened late one night by the sound of a horse galloping on the road, followed by precipitate knocking at the inn-door. He opened his window and saw a farm servant, mounted and holding a led horse by the bridle, who told him to make what haste he could and go along with him; for Marjory was dying, and had sent urgently to fetch him to her bedside. Will was no horseman, and made so little speed upon the way that the poor young wife was very near her end before he arrived. But they had some minutes' talk in private, and he was present and wept very bitterly while she breathed her last.
Year after year went away into nothing, with great explosions and outcries in the cities on the plain; red revolt springing up and being suppressed in blood, battle swaying hither and thither, patient astronomers in observatory towers picking out and christening new stars, plays being performed in lighted theatres, people being carried into hospitals on stretchers, and all the usual turmoil and agitation of men's lives in crowded centres. Up in Will'svalley only the winds and seasons made an epoch; the fish hung in the swift stream, the birds circled overhead, the pine-tops rustled underneath the stars, the tall hills stood over all; and Will went to and fro, minding his wayside inn, until the snow began to thicken on his head. His heart was young and vigorous; and if his pulses kept a sober time, they still beat strong and steady in his wrists. He carried a ruddy stain on either cheek, like a ripe apple; he stooped a little, but his step was still firm; and his sinewy hands were reached out to all men with a friendly pressure. His face was covered with those wrinkles which are got in open air, and which, rightly looked at, are no more than a sort of permanent sunburning; such wrinkles heighten the stupidity of stupid faces; but to a person like Will, with his clear eyes and smiling mouth, only give another charm by testifying to a simple and easy life. His talk was full of wise sayings. He had a taste for other people; and other people had a taste for him. When the valley was full of tourists in the season, there were merry nights in Will's arbour; and his views, which seemed whimsical to his neighbours, were often enough admired by learned people out of towns and colleges. Indeed, he had a very noble old age, and grew daily better known; so that his fame was heard of in the cities of the plain; and young men who had been summer travellers spoke together incafésof Will o' the Mill and his rough philosophy. Many and many an invitation, you may be sure, he had; but nothing could tempt him from his upland valley. He wouldshake his head and smile over his tobacco-pipe with a deal of meaning. "You come too late," he would answer. "I am a dead man now: I have lived and died already. Fifty years ago you would have brought my heart into my mouth; and now you do not even tempt me. But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life." And again: "There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last." Or once more: "When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew whether it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now, I know it is myself, and stick to that."
He never showed any symptoms of frailty, but kept stalwart and firm to the last; but they say he grew less talkative towards the end, and would listen to other people by the hour in an amused and sympathetic silence. Only, when he did speak, it was more to the point and more charged with old experience. He drank a bottle of wine gladly; above all, at sunset on the hilltop or quite late at night under the stars in the arbour. The sight of something attractive and unattainable seasoned his enjoyment, he would say; and he professed he had lived long enough to admire a candle all the more when he could compare it with a planet.
One night, in his seventy-second year, he awoke in bed, in such uneasiness of body and mind that he arose and dressed himself and went out to meditate in the arbour. It was pitch dark, without a star; the river was swollen, and the wet woods andmeadows loaded the air with perfume. It had thundered during the day, and it promised more thunder for the morrow. A murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two! Whether it was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little touch of fever in his old limbs, Will's mind was besieged by tumultuous and crying memories. His boyhood, the night with the fat young man, the death of his adopted parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of those small circumstances, which seem nothing to another, and are yet the very gist of a man's own life to himself—things seen, words heard, looks misconstrued—arose from their forgotten corners and usurped his attention. The dead themselves were with him, not merely taking part in this thin show of memory that defiled before his brain, but revisiting his bodily senses as they do in profound and vivid dreams. The fat young man leaned his elbows on the table opposite; Marjory came and went with an apronful of flowers between the garden and the arbour; he could hear the old parson knocking out his pipe or blowing his resonant nose. The tide of his consciousness ebbed and flowed: he was sometimes half-asleep and drowned in his recollections of the past; and sometimes he was broad awake, wondering at himself. But about the middle of the night he was startled by the voice of the dead miller calling to him out of the house as he used to do on the arrival of custom. The hallucination was so perfect that Will sprang from his seat and stood listening for the summons to be repeated; and as he listened he became conscious ofanother noise besides the brawling of the river and the ringing in his feverish ears. It was like the stir of the horses and the creaking of harness, as though a carriage with an impatient team had been brought up upon the road before the courtyard gate. At such an hour, upon this rough and dangerous pass, the supposition was no better than absurd; and Will dismissed it from his mind, and resumed his seat upon the arbour chair; and sleep closed over him again like running water. He was once again awakened by the dead miller's call, thinner and more spectral than before; and once again he heard the noise of an equipage upon the road. And so thrice and four times, the same dream, or the same fancy, presented itself to his senses: until at length, smiling to himself as when one humours a nervous child, he proceeded towards the gate to set his uncertainty at rest.
From the arbour to the gate was no great distance, and yet it took Will some time; it seemed as if the dead thickened around him in the court, and crossed his path at every step. For, first, he was suddenly surprised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes; it was as if his garden had been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot, damp night had drawn forth all their perfumes in a breath. Now the heliotrope had been Marjory's favourite flower, and since her death not one of them had ever been planted in Will's ground.
"I must be going crazy," he thought. "Poor Marjory and her heliotropes!"
And with that he raised his eyes towards the window that had once been hers. If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified; for there was a light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as of yore; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the night when he stood and shouted to the stars in his perplexity. The illusion only endured an instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned, rubbing his eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the black night behind it. While he thus stood, and it seemed as if he must have stood there quite a long time, there came a renewal of the noises on the road; and he turned in time to meet a stranger, who was advancing to meet him across the court. There was something like the outline of a great carriage discernible on the road behind the stranger, and, above that, a few black pine-tops, like so many plumes.
"Master Will?" asked the new-comer, in brief military fashion.
"That same, sir," answered Will. "Can I do anything to serve you?"
"I have heard you much spoken of, Master Will," returned the other; "much spoken of, and well. And though I have both hands full of business, I wish to drink a bottle of wine with you in your arbour. Before I go, I shall introduce myself."
Will led the way to the trellis, and got a lamp lighted and a bottle uncorked. He was not altogether unused to such complimentary interviews, and hoped little enough from this one, being schooled by many disappointments. A sort of cloud had settled on his wits and prevented him from remembering the strangeness of the hour. He moved like a person in his sleep; and it seemed as if the lamp caught fire and the bottle came uncorked with the facility of thought. Still, he had some curiosity about the appearance of his visitor, and tried in vain to turn the light into his face; either he handled the lamp clumsily, or there was a dimness over his eyes, but he could make out little more than a shadow at table with him. He stared and stared at this shadow, as he wiped out the glasses, and began to feel cold and strange about the heart. The silence weighed upon him, for he could hear nothing now, not even the river, but the drumming of his own arteries in his ears.
"Here's to you," said the stranger roughly.
"Here is my service, sir," replied Will, sipping his wine, which somehow tasted oddly.
"I understand you are a very positive fellow," pursued the stranger.
Will made answer with a smile of some satisfaction and a little nod.
"So am I," continued the other; "and it is the delight of my heart to tramp on people's corns. I will have nobody positive but myself; not one. I have crossed the whims, in my time, of kings and generals and great artists. And what would you say," he went on, "if I had come up here on purpose to cross yours?"
Will had it on his tongue to make a sharp rejoinder; but the politeness of an old innkeeper prevailed; and he held his peace and made answer with a civil gesture of the hand.
"I have," said the stranger. "And if I did not hold you in a particular esteem I should make no words about the matter. It appears you pride yourself on staying where you are. You mean to stick by your inn. Now I mean you shall come for a turn with me in my barouche; and before this bottle's empty, so you shall."
"That would be an odd thing, to be sure," replied Will, with a chuckle. "Why, sir, I have grown here like an old oak-tree; the Devil himself could hardly root me up: and for all I perceive you are a very entertaining old gentleman, I would wager you another bottle you lose your pains with me."
The dimness of Will's eyesight had been increasing all this while; but he was somehow conscious of a sharp and chilling scrutiny which irritated and yet overmastered him.
"You need not think," he broke out suddenly, in an explosive, febrile manner that startled and alarmed himself, "that I am a stay-at-home, because I fear anything under God. God knows I am tired enough of it all; and when the times comes for a longer journey than ever you dream of, I reckon I shall find myself prepared."
The stranger emptied his glass and pushed it away from him. He looked down for a little, and then, leaning over the table, tapped Will three times upon the forearm with a single finger. "The time has come!" he said solemnly.
An ugly thrill spread from the spot he touched. The tones of his voice were dull and startling, and echoed strangely in Will's heart.
"I beg your pardon," he said, with some discomposure. "What do you mean?"
"Look at me, and you will find your eyesight swim. Raise your hand; it is dead-heavy. This is your last bottle of wine, Master Will, and your last night upon the earth."
"You are a doctor?" quavered Will.
"The best that ever was," replied the other; "for I cure both mind and body with the same prescription. I take away all pain and I forgive all sins; and where my patients have gone wrong in life, I smooth out all complications and set them free again upon their feet."
"I have no need of you," said Will.
"A time comes for all men, Master Will," replied the doctor, "when the helm is taken out of their hands. For you, because you were prudent and quiet, it has been long of coming, and you have had long to discipline yourself for its reception. You have seen what is to be seen about your mill; you have sat close all your days like a hare in its form; but now that is at an end; and," added the doctor, getting on his feet, "you must arise and come with me."
"You are a strange physician," said Will, looking steadfastly upon his guest.
"I am a natural law," he replied, "and people call me Death."
"Why did you not tell me so at first?" cried Will. "I have been waiting for you these many years. Give me your hand, and welcome."
"Lean upon my arm," said the stranger, "foralready your strength abates. Lean on me heavily as you need; for though I am old, I am very strong. It is but three steps to my carriage, and there all your trouble ends. Why, Will," he added, "I have been yearning for you as if you were my own son; and of all the men that ever I came for in my long days, I have come for you most gladly. I am caustic, and sometimes offend people at first sight; but I am a good friend at heart to such as you."
"Since Marjory was taken," returned Will, "I declare before God you were the only friend I had to look for."
So the pair went arm-in-arm across the courtyard.
One of the servants awoke about this time and heard the noise of horses pawing before he dropped asleep again; all down the valley that night there was a rushing as of a smooth and steady wind descending towards the plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure enough Will o' the Mill had gone at last upon his travels.
"Boswell: We grow weary when idle,""Johnson: That is, because others being busy, we want company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain one another."
Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them oflése-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness, so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despisethe unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome,and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune ofthe water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue:—
"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"
"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"
"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."
"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it mathematics?"
"No, to be sure."
"Is it metaphysics?"
"Nor that."
"Is it some language?"
"Nay, it is no language."
"Is it a trade?"
"Nor a trade neither."
"Why, then, what is't?"
"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment."
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman!"
And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of whichthey will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art; to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them—by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented,but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
Extremebusyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: theycannotbe idle,their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appear to me as being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and children, hisfriends and relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had neverdone him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties; like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humour; one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gavehim some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Mortality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil featurein other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.
And what in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personalvainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of nosingle individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune and hence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.
I saw you toss the kites on highAnd blow the birds about the sky;And all around I heard you pass,Like ladies' skirts across the grass—O wind, a-blowing all day long,O wind, that sings so loud a song!I saw the different things you did,But always you yourself you hid.I felt you push, I heard you call,I could not see yourself at all—O wind, a-blowing all day long,O wind, that sings so loud a song!O you that are so strong and cold,O blower, are you young or old?Are you a beast of field and tree,Or just a stronger child than me?O wind, a-blowing all day long,O wind, that sings so loud a song!
Over the borders, a sin without pardon,Breaking the branches and crawling below,Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,Down by the banks of the river, we go.
Here is the mill with the humming of thunder,Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,Here is the sluice with the race running under—Marvellous places, though handy to home!Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller,Stiller the note of the birds on the hill;Dusty and dim are the eyes of the miller,Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill.Years may go by, and the wheel in the riverWheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day,Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for everLong after all of the boys are away.Home from the Indies and home from the ocean,Heroes and soldiers we all shall come home;Still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion,Turning and churning that river to foam.You with the bean that I gave when we quarrelled,I with your marble of Saturday last,Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled,Here we shall meet and remember the past.
The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;She shines on thieves on the garden wall,On streets and fields and harbour quays,And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse,The howling dog by the door of the house,The bat that lies in bed at noon,All love to be out by the light of the moon.But all of the things that belong to the dayCuddle to sleep to be out of her way;And flowers and children close their eyesTill up in the morning the sun shall arise.
Smooth it slides upon its travel,Here a wimple, there a gleam—O the clean gravel!O the smooth stream!Sailing blossoms, silver fishes,Paven pools as clear as air—How a child wishesTo live down there!We can see our coloured facesFloating on the shaken poolDown in cool places,Dim and very cool;Till a wind or water wrinkle,Dipping marten, plumping trout,Spreads in a twinkleAnd blots all out.See the rings pursue each other;All below grows black as night,Just as if motherHad blown out the light!Patience, children, just a minute—See spreading circles die;The stream and all in itWill clear by-and-by.
Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;Blinks but an hour or two; and then,A blood-red orange, sets again.Before the stars have left the skies,At morning in the dark I rise;And shivering in my nakedness,By the cold candle, bathe and dress.Close by the jolly fire I sitTo warm my frozen bones a bit;Or with a reindeer-sled, exploreThe colder countries round the door.When to go out, my nurse doth wrapMe in my comforter and cap;The cold wind burns my face, and blowsIts frosty pepper up my nose.Black are my steps on silver sod;Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;And tree and house, and hill and lake,Are frosted like a wedding-cake.
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all.He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.He stays so close beside me, he's a coward you can see;I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!One morning, very early, before the sun was up,I rose and found the shining dew on every butter-cup;But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.
In the other gardensAnd all up the vale,From the autumn bonfiresSee the smoke trail!Pleasant summer overAnd all the summer flowers,The red fire blazes,The gray smoke towers.Sing a song of seasons!Something bright in all!Flowers in the summer,Fires in the fall!
Story, Robert, the author of the following poem, was born in Scotland in 1790, and died there in 1859. The poem is much more famous than its author, having been reprinted time and again, and sometimes under the wrong author's name. It is one of those pieces that are called "fugitive," which means that it has no particular abiding place in type, but makes its home in collections, being, as it were, an only child. Simple as it is, it has stood the test of time and is here given for this reason, no less than for its appropriateness.
"You have heard," said a youth to his sweetheart, who stoodWhile he sat on a corn-sheaf, at daylight's decline,—"You have heard of the Danish boy's whistle of wood:I wish that the Danish boy's whistle were mine.""And what would you do with it? Tell me," she said,While an arch smile played over her beautiful face."I would blow it," he answered, "and then my fair maidWould fly to my side and would there take her place.""Is that all you wish for? Why, that may be yoursWithout any magic," the fair maiden cried:"A favor so slight one's good nature secures;"And she playfully seated herself by his side."I would blow it again," said the youth; "and the charmWould work so that not even modesty's checkWould be able to keep from my neck your white arm."She smiled, and she laid her white arm round his neck."Yet once more I would blow; and the music divineWould bring me a third time an exquisite bliss,—You would lay your fair cheek to this brown one of mineAnd your lips stealing past it would give me a kiss."The maiden laughed out in her innocent glee,—"What a fool of yourself with the whistle you'd make!For only consider how silly 'twould beTo sit there and whistle for what you might take."
Strickland, Agnes, an English historical writer; born in London, August, 1796, and died at Southwold, July, 1874. Her best and most celebrated work isLives of the Queens of England, from which the following biographical account is taken.
Henrietta Maria was the sixth child and youngest daughter of Henry IV. of France, by his second wife, Marie de Medicis. She was born at the Louvre, November 25, 1609. Great as Henry was, he suffered his mind to be swayed by predictions. He had been told that he should die the day after his queen was crowned. To her great mortification, he would not permit that ceremony to be performed until after the birth of his youngest daughter. The queen prevailed on him to give orders for her coronation at St. Denis, where it took place, when Henriette, who was only five months old, was present, held in her nurse's arms, on one side of her mother's throne, surrounded by her brothers and sisters—a group of very beautiful children—the dauphin, too soon to be Louis XIII., Gaston, Elizabeth, and Christine. The next day Henry IV. was assassinated by Ravillac in the streets of Paris, May 13, 1610.
The royal children were barricaded all that dreary night in the guard-room at the Louvre, next to thechamber where the king's bleeding corpse lay. No one slept in the palace excepting the infant Henriette, whose peaceful slumbers in her nurse's arms were in strange contrast to the grief and terror of all around, for it was believed that an insurrection would follow the regicidal act. Again the infant princess appeared in her nurse's arms, at the funeral of the royal hero of France, and once more, at the coronation of her young brother at Rheims, when she was only ten months old. Her governess was Mademoiselle de Monglat, whom she used to call Mamanga. She received her education from her brother Gaston's school-master, M. de Bevis: she was the constant companion of Duke Gaston, who was only eighteen months older than herself.
Henriette was the darling of her mother, perhaps her spoiled darling, for Maria de Medicis, queen-regent of France, was neither wise nor judicious. When the queen was deprived of the regency and her liberty, Henriette was permitted to share her royal mother's captivity.
When the queen-mother recovered her liberty, the young Henriette, not then fifteen, became the ornament of the court. Anne of Austria, the young queen-consort of Louis XIII., cherished love and friendship for her sister-in-law, of which Henriette found the benefit in her worst fortunes.
When Henriette was only in her fourteenth year, she and her future consort, Charles, Prince of Wales, unknown to each other, met at a ball in the palace of the king her brother, early in February, 1623. The Prince of Wales and his father's favourite minister, George Villiers, Earl of Buckingham, were travelling incognito to Madrid, under the homely names of Tom Smith and Jack Smith. The object of the Prince of Wales was to see the infanta Donna Maria (with whom he was engaged by the king his father in a treaty of marriage), and to make acquaintance with her before they should be irrevocably bound in wedlock. The prince and his companion halted at Paris, and went like others to see the Louvre, and look at the royal family of France on the night of the ball. Struck by their personal appearance, the Duke de Montbazan gave the handsome and distinguished-looking strangers advantageous places in the hall of the Louvre, where Charles saw the beautiful Henriette dance. The circumstance was afterward mentioned to Henriette, who sighed, and said, "Ah! the Prince of Wales needed not have gone so far as Spain to look for a wife." She had not noticed Jack Smith in the gallery of the Louvre, yet she had seen portraits of Charles, who was the most graceful prince in Europe.
The Spanish match was broken off. Donna Maria afterward married the Emperor of Germany. James I. demanded the hand of the beautiful Henriette for his heir.
The English people preferred having a daughter of the Protestant hero, Henry the Great, for their queen, to the grand-daughter of the cruel Philip II. of Spain. Unfortunately, Henriette had been brought up in the most ignorant bigotry by her mother. We have read a letter, very much wornwith often unfolding, of advice and instruction from this queen to her daughter, regarding her conduct in England, in which she mentions the belief of the English in the same terms as if they were Jews. Such imputation the creed of the Anglican Church no more deserved than her own. Unfortunately, her young daughter was utterly ignorant of all history but that from prejudiced sources, as she afterward deeply regretted to her friend Madame de Motteville.
The marriage articles were very tedious, and much disputed; a clause was left by the council of James I., giving his son's consort power in the education of her children until their thirteenth year; a clause regretted by Charles, and which his determination to break afterward, occasioned the only real unhappiness in his married life. When all was ready for the betrothal, James I. died, March, 1624-5.
Some anxiety was shown lest the young king, Charles I., should not ratify his father's treaty; but the wooing ambassadors, the Earls of Carlisle and Holland, had described the young princess in such favourable terms that Charles was eager to complete the agreement. In one of Holland's letters to Charles she is thus mentioned: "In truth, she is the sweetest creature in France, and the loveliest thing in nature. I heard her the other day discourse with her mother and her ladies with wondrous discretion. She dances—the which I am witness of—as well as I ever saw. They say she sings most sweetly; I am sure she looks as if she did!" In thecourse of a few days the Earl of Holland heard this wonderful voice. "I had been told much of it," he wrote; "but I find it true that neither her singing-master, nor any man or woman in Europe, singeth as she doth; her voice is beyond all imagination!" The musical and vocal powers of the queen-mother of France, Marie de Medicis, were likewise of the finest order; and her youngest daughter had inherited from her, gifts lavishly bestowed by nature on the children of Italy.
Pope Urban VIII. was exceedingly adverse to the English marriage: he had been Henrietta's god-father when he was cardinal legate in France. He was unwilling to grant a dispensation for his god-child wedding out of their Church; putting his objection on his duty to guard her happiness, rather than the usual polemic wranglings. No one can deny that his historical acumen was right in what he said—"If the Stuart king relaxed the bloody penal laws against the Roman Catholics, the English would not suffer him to live long. If they were continued, what happiness could the French princess have in her wedlock?" These were the words of wisdom, and ought to have been heeded. But the unwise prejudice against placing a princess on the English throne of lower rank than the royalties of France or Spain, unduly influenced James I., or rather his English council, since he did not act thus in his own case.
Charles I. and Louis XIII. resolved to proceed with the betrothal without Urban's dispensation, which, of course, caused it to be sent very quickly. Henriette and Charles I. were betrothed, May 8, 1625, by proxy. She was dressed in a magnificent robe woven with gold and silver, and flowered with French lilies in gems and diamonds. The marriage took place three days afterward. The palace of the Archbishop of Paris (but lately destroyed) stood just behind Notre Dame; a gallery-bridge connected it with that cathedral, hung with violet satin, figured with gold fleur-de-lis; the marriage procession passed over it from the palace to Notre Dame. The bride was led by her young brother Gaston, and was given away by the king, Louis XIII.
The Duke de Chevreuse, a near kinsman of Charles I., was his proxy; he was attired in black velvet; but over this plain attire wore a scarf flowered with diamond roses; the queen-mother shone like a pillar of precious stones; her long train was borne by two princesses of the blood, Condè and Conti. The marriage took place in the porch of Notre Dame; the English ambassadors, and even the proxy of England, out of respect to the religious feelings of Charles I., withdrew from Notre Dame during the concluding mass.
The Duke of Buckingham, ambassador-extraordinary from England, arrived at the conclusion of the ceremony. He was angry because he was too late—and certainly behaved in a most extraordinary manner while in France. Subsequently, he was on ill terms with the young Queen of England.
The Duke of Buckingham caused many delays by his flighty conduct. At last the cortége of the bride approached Boulogne. Charles I. came toDover Castle to meet and welcome his queen. Her passage was dangerous. The king had that Sunday retired to Canterbury, thinking the bride could not embark in the storm. However, she landed at Dover, June 23, 1625, at seven in the evening. At ten, next day, the king arrived while she was at breakfast; he wished to wait, for she had been very ill with sea-sickness. Yet the bride rose hastily from table, hasted down a pair of stairs to meet the king, then offered to kneel and kiss his hand; but he wrapped her up in his arms with many kisses. "Sir, I have come to your majesty's country to be commanded by you," were the set words the poor bride had prepared for her first speech to Charles, but her voice failed, and ended with a gush of tears. Charles kindly led her apart, kissed off her tears, and said he should do so while they fell. His tenderness soon soothed the weeping girl, and she entered into familiar discourse with the royal lover. Charles seemed pleased that she was taller than he had heard; and, finding she reached the height of his shoulder, he glanced downward at her feet. Her quickness caught his meaning, and she said to him, in French, "I stand on my own feet; I have no help from art; thus tall am I, neither higher nor lower."
The young queen then presented all her French attendants to Charles, beginning with her cousin, the beautiful Madame de St. George, formerly her governess, now her first lady of the bed-chamber. To her the king very early took an antipathy.
The same eventful day, the bride, the king, and court set out for Canterbury, where the marriagewas to be celebrated. On a beautiful extent of greensward, called Barham downs, a banquet was prepared; and in the pavilions the bride-queen was introduced to the ladies of her English household, and the noblemen and gentlemen appointed to her service. That evening, Charles and Henrietta were married in the noble hall of St. Augustine, Canterbury.
Next morning they embarked at Gravesend, the king choosing to enter his capital by the grand highway of the Thames, that he might show his bride the stately shipping of his noble navy, which greeted the royal procession as it passed on its progress up the stream with thundering salutes, while the river was covered with thousands of boats and beautiful barges belonging to the nobility and merchants of London. A violent thunder-shower came on as the procession neared the landing-place at Whitehall; the queen, however, waved her hand repeatedly to the people. She was splendidly dressed; like the king, the colour she wore was green.
Even in the first days of his marriage, Charles I. saw strong reason to lament he had admitted the Roman Catholic colony with his young queen. His position was extremely difficult; he foresaw all its dangers, and came early to the resolution of neutralizing the worst features of the case. The queen was childish in years; her reason totally uncultivated; she was, moreover, alike ignorant of the language and history of the country. Her confessor and her bishop were probably not less bigoted than herself; and the king knew that their celebrationof rites, of which they would abate not one jot, was the greatest offence in the eyes of his people. It was his ruin, as the natural good sense of Henrietta afterward acknowledged, in her confessions of passionate penitence to her friend, Madame de Motteville.
Charles I. found great cause to regret the establishment of his queen's Roman Catholic train of priests and attendants, besides other injurious stipulations in the marriage treaty his dying father's council had ratified. The queen was but an unreasoning girl of sixteen, entirely guided by the unusually large train she had about her. She would not learn English, and was encouraged by her French attendants to pay little regard to the customs and prejudices of the nation over which her consort reigned. Thus, she would not be crowned, February 2, 1626, lest she should join in the rites of the Church of England; she was the only Queen of England who ever refused her coronation; this deeply grieved her husband and incensed his people, who never forgave the offence, as she found afterward to her cost.
Charles was crownedsolus. Henrietta viewed the coronation procession from the palace gate-way by King Street. Her French officials were accused of capering irreverently during the solemnity—as they were not in the abbey, that was no great crime; yet the next time Charles I. caught them capering he made it an excuse for a general clearance. He thus got rid of six ecclesiastics, many French ladies, especially of Madame St. George, who claimed the privilege of occupying a seat in the royal carriagewherever the king and queen went, to the great annoyance of Charles. Her place, as the queen's first lady, was filled by the Protestant Madame de la Tremouille. Only Pére Gamache and another very quiet humble priest were allowed for the service of his queen's chapel by Charles I. Such innovations enraged the young queen greatly; she threw herself into agonies of rage at the departure of her French attendants; and in her fury contrived to break the windows of the king's closet or private apartment at Whitehall, although he restrained her by keeping the casement shut, and holding both her wrists, because he forbade her to bid them farewell when they embarked at Whitehall stairs. The king did not send them empty away; 22,000l. was distributed among them; nevertheless, the French women of the royal bed-chamber carried off all the queen's clothes, as lawful perquisites, leaving, besides the dress she wore, only an old gown and three chemises—not good for much. The king tenderly soothed his afflicted consort, who seemed to be reconciled; but before the close of the year, 1626, she manifested such temper that Louis XIII. sent his father's old friend, the Duke de Bassompierre, as ambassador-extraordinary, to inquire into his sister's conjugal unhappiness.
Mischief had been made by the king's prime minister, the Duke of Buckingham, as plainly may be seen by the royal letters extant.[1]Since the timesof Henry VIII. the boundaries of the royal parks of Whitehall and St. James had been decorated with gallows, and many of them loaded with human heads and quarters. In the first month of Henrietta's arrival in London, it was said that her priests had caused her to make a pilgrimage to the gallows where the last Roman Catholic priests had been put to death for their faith, that she went barefoot, and knelt there praying. Bassompierre, who talked until he lost his voice, and after great exertions, made out this accusation, which the young queen utterly denied. "She never was near the gallows," she said, "never at that time knew where it was, until lately when she was walking with the king in Hyde Park." A fine terminus to the evening walk of a fair young queen under eighteen! Another tale was embodied in council-minutes, "that the queen's priest had made her, for penance, eat off wooden trenchers." When Bassompierre asked her, "How about the wooden platters?" the queen disdained to reply.