Let Imperialism, legitimist or democratic, match that! Florence, too, had her political vices, many and grave, she tyrannized over Pisa and other dependants, there was faction in her councils, anarchy, bloody anarchy, in her streets, for her, too, the hour of doom arrived, and the conspiracy of the Pazzi was as much an anachronism as that of the republicans who slew Caesar. But Florence had that heart composed of the united spirits of many citizens out of which came all that the world admires and loves in the works of the Florentine. She produced, though she exiled Dante. That which followed was more tranquil, more orderly perhaps, materially speaking, not less happy, but it had no heart at all.
[Footnote: "A Memoir of Jane Austen. By her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh,Vicar of Bray, Berks." London: Richard Bentley; New York: Scribner,Welford & Co.]
The walls of our cities were placarded, the other day, with an advertisement of a new sensational novel, the flaring woodcut of which represented a girl tied down upon a table, and a villain preparing to cut off her feet. If this were the general taste, there would be no use in talking about Jane Austen. But if you ask at the libraries you will find that her works are still taken out; so that there must still be a faithful few who, like ourselves, will have welcomed the announcement of a Memoir of the authoress of "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park," and "Emma."
If Jane Austen's train of admirers has not been so large as those of many other novelists, it has been first-rate in quality. She has been praised—we should rather say, loved by all, from Walter Scott to Guizot, whose love was the truest fame. Her name has often been coupled with that of Shakespeare, to whom Macaulay places her second in the nice discrimination of shades of character. The difference between the two minds in degree is, of course, immense; but both belong to the same rare kind. Both are really creative; both purely artistic; both have the marvellous power of endowing the products of their imagination with a life, as it were, apart from their own. Each holds up a perfectly clear and undistorting mirror—Shakespeare to the moral universe, Jane Austen to the little world in which she lived. In the case of neither does the personality of the author ever come between the spectator and the drama. Vulgar criticism calls Jane Austen's work Dutch painting. Miniature painting would be nearer the truth; she speaks of herself as working with a fine brush on a piece of ivory two inches wide. Dutch painting implies the selection of subjects in themselves low and uninteresting, for the purpose of displaying the skill of a painter, who can interest by the mere excellence of his imitation. Jane Austen lived in the society of English country gentlemen and their families as they were in the last century—a society affluent, comfortable, domestic, rather monotonous, without the interest which attaches to the struggles of labour without tragic events or figures seldom, in fact rising dramatically above the level of sentimental comedy, but presenting nevertheless, its varieties of character, its vicissitudes, its moral lessons—in a word, its humanity. She has painted it as it was, in all its features the most tragic as well as the most comic, avoiding only melodrama. "In all the important preparations of the mind, she (Miss Bertram) was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint and tranquillity, by the misery of disappointed affection and contempt of the man she was to marry; the rest might wait." This is not the touch of Gerard Douw. An undertone of irony, never obtrusive but everywhere perceptible, shows that the artist herself knew very well that she was not painting gods and Titans, and keeps everything on the right level.
Jane Austen, then, was worthy of a memoir. But it was almost too late to write one. Like Shakespeare, she was too artistic to be autobiographic. She was never brought into contact with men of letters, and her own fame was almost posthumous, so that nobody took notes. She had been fifty years in her grave when her nephew, the Rev J. E. Austen-Leigh, the youngest of the mourners who attended her funeral, undertook to make a volume of his own recollections, those of one or two other surviving relatives, and a few letters. Of 230 pages, in large print, and with a margin the vastness of which requires to be relieved by a rod rubric, not above a third is really biography, the rest is genealogy, description of places, manners, and customs, critical disquisition, testimonies of admirers. Still, thanks to the real capacity of the biographer, and to the strong impression left by a character of remarkable beauty on his mind, we catch a pretty perfect though faint outline of the figure which was just hovering on the verge of memory, and in a few years more would, like the figure of Shakespeare, have been swallowed up in night.
Jane Austen was the flower of a stock, full, apparently, through all its branches, of shrewd sense and caustic humour, which in her were combined with the creative imagination. She was born in 1775, at Steventon, in Hampshire, a country parish, of which her father was the rector. A village of cottages at the foot of a gentle slope, an old church with its coeval yew, an old manor-house, an old parsonage all surrounded by tall elms, green meadows, hedgerows full of primroses and wild hyacinths—such was the scene in which Jane Austen grew. It is the picture which rises in the mind of every Englishman when he thinks of his country. Around dwelt the gentry, more numerous and, if coarser and duller, more home-loving and less like pachas than they are now, when the smaller squires and yeomen have been swallowed up in the growing lordships of a few grandees who spend more than half their time in London or in other seats of politics or pleasure. Not far off was a country town, a "Meriton," the central gossiping place of the neighbourhood, and the abode of the semi-genteel. If a gentleman like Mr. Woodhouse lives equivocally close to the town, his "place" is distinguished by a separate name. There was no resident squire at Steventon, the old manor-house being let to a tenant, so that Jane's father was at once parson and squire. "That house (Edmund Bertram's parsonage) may receive such an air as to make its owner be set down as the great landowner of the parish by every creature travelling the road, especially as there is no real squire's house to dispute the point, a circumstance, between ourselves, to enhance the value of such a situation in point of privilege and advantage beyond all calculation." Her father having from old age resigned Steventon when Jane was six and twenty, she afterwards lived for a time with her family at Bath, a great watering-place, and the scene of the first part of "Northanger Abbey;" at Lyme, a pretty little sea-bathing place on the coast of Dorset, on the "Cobb" of which takes place the catastrophe of "Persuasion;" and at Southampton, now a great port, then a special seat of gentility. Finally, she found a second home with her widowed mother and her sister at Chawton, another village in Hampshire.
"In person," says Jane's biographer, "she was very attractive. Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion, she was a clear brunette, with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed; bright hazel eyes (it is a touch of the woman, then, when Emma is described as havingthe true hazel eye), and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face." The sweetness and playfulness of "Dear Aunt Jane" are fresh after so many years in the memories of her nephew and nieces, who also strongly attest the sound sense and sterling excellence of character which lay beneath. She was a special favourite with children, for whom she delighted to exercise her talent in improvising fairy-tales. Unknown to fame, uncaressed save by family affection, and, therefore, unspoilt, while writing was her delight, she kept it in complete subordination to the duties of life, which she performed with exemplary conscientiousness in the house of mourning as well as in the house of feasting. Even her needlework was superfine. We doubt not that, if the truth was known, she was a good cook.
She calls herself "the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress;" but this is a nominal tribute to the jealousy of female erudition which then prevailed, and at which she sometimes glances, though herself very far from desiring a masculine education for women. In fact, she was well versed in English literature, read French with ease, and knew something of Italian—German was not thought of in those days. She had a sweet voice, and sang to her own accompaniment simple old songs which still linger in her nephew's ear. Her favourite authors were Johnson, whose strong sense was congenial to her, while she happily did not allow him to infect her pure and easy style, Cowper, Richardson and Crabbe. She said that, if she married at all, she should like to be Mrs. Crabbe. And besides Crabbe's general influence, which is obvious, we often see his special touch in her writings:
"Emma's spirits were mounted up quite to happiness. Everything wore a different air. James and his horses seemed not half so sluggish as before. When she looked at the hedges, she thought the elder at least must soon be coming out; and, when she turned round to Harriet, she saw something like a look of spring—a tender smile even there."
Jane was supremely happy in her family relations, especially in the love of her elder sister, Cassandra, from whom she was inseparable. Of her four brothers, two were officers in the Royal Navy. How she watched their career, how she welcomed them home from the perils not only of the sea but of war (for it was the time of the great war with France), she has told us in painting the reception of William Price by his sister Fanny, in "Mansfield Park." It is there that she compares conjugal and fraternal love, giving the preference in one respect to the latter, because with brothers and sisters "all the evil and good of the earliest years can be gone over again, and every former united pain and pleasure retraced with the fondest recollection: an advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal." It was, perhaps, because she was so happy in the love of her brothers and sisters, as well as because she was wedded to literature, that she was content, in spite of her good looks, to assume the symbolic cap of perpetual maidenhood at an unusually early age.
Thus she grew in a spot as sunny, as sheltered, and as holy as do the violets which her biographer tells us abound beneath the south wall of Steventon church. It was impossible that she should have the experiences of Miss Bronte or Madame Sand, and without some experience the most vivid imagination cannot act, or can act only in the production of mere chimeras. To forestall Miss Braddon in the art of criminal phantasmagoria might have been within Jane's power by the aid of strong green tea, but would obviously have been repugnant to her nature. We must not ask her, then, for the emotions and excitements which she could not possibly afford. The character of Emma is called commonplace. It is commonplace in the sense in which the same term might be applied to any normal beauty of nature—to a well-grown tree or to a perfectly developed flower. She is, as Mr. Weston says, "the picture of grown-up health." "There is health not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her gait, her glance." She has been brought up like Jane Austen herself, in a pure English household, among loving relations and good old servants. Her feet have been in the path of domestic and neighbourly duty, quiet as the path which leads to the village church. It has been impossible for strong temptations or fierce passions to come near her. Yet men accustomed to the most exciting struggles, to the most powerful emotions of parliamentary life, have found an interest, equal to the greatest ever created by a sensation novel, in the little scrapes and adventures into which her weakness betrays her, and in the process by which her heart is gradually drawn away from objects apparently more attractive to the robust nature in union with which she is destined to find strength as well as happiness.
With more justice may Jane Austen be reproached with having been too much influenced by the prejudices of the somewhat narrow and somewhat vulgarly aristocratic, or rather plutocratic, society in which she lived. Her irony and her complete dramatic impersonality render it difficult to see how far this goes; but certainly it goes further than we could wish. Decidedly she believes in gentility, and in its intimate connection with affluence and good family; in its incompatibility with any but certain very refined and privileged kinds of labour; in the impossibility of finding a gentleman in a trader, much more in a yeoman or mechanic. "The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do; a degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance, might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other; but a farmer can need none of my help, and is, therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice as in every other he is below it." This is said by Emma—by Emma when she is trying to deter her friend from marrying a yeoman, it is true, but still by Emma. The picture of the coarseness of poverty in the household of Fanny's parents in "Mansfield Park" is truth, but it is hard truth, and needs some counterpoise. Both in the case of Fanny Price and in that of Frank Churchill, the entire separation of a child from its own home for the sake of the worldly advantages furnished by an adoptive home of a superior class, is presented too much as a part of the order of nature. The charge of acquiescence in the low standard of clerical duty prevalent in the Establishment of that day is well founded, though perhaps not of much importance. Of more importance is the charge which might be made, with equal justice, of acquiescence in somewhat low and coarse ideas of the relations between the sexes, and of the destinies and proper aspirations of young women. "Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary; but still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune; and, however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now attained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good-luck of it." This reflection is ascribed to Charlotte Lucas, an inferior character, but still thought worthy to be the heroine's bosom friend.
Jane's first essays in composition were burlesques on the fashionable manners of the day; whence grew "Northanger Abbey," with its anti- heroine, Catharine Morley, "roving and wild, hating constraint and cleanliness, and loving nothing so much as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house," and with its exquisite travestie of the "Mysteries of Udolpho." But she soon felt her higher power. Marvellous to say, she began "Pride and Prejudice" in 1796, before she was twenty- one years old, and completed it in the following year. "Sense and Sensibility" and "Northanger Abbey" immediately followed; it appears, with regard to the latter, that she had already visited Bath, though it was not till afterwards that she resided there. But she published nothing—not only so, but it seems that she entirely suspended composition—till 1809, when her family settled at Chawton. Here she revised for the press what she had written, and wrote "Mansfield Park," "Emma" and "Persuasion." "Persuasion," whatever her nephew and biographer may say, and however Dr. Whewell may have fired up at the suggestion, betrays an enfeeblement of her faculties, and tells of approaching death. But we still see in it the genuine creative power multiplying new characters; whereas novelists who are not creative, when they have exhausted their original fund of observations, are forced to subsist by exaggeration of their old characters, by aggravated extravagances of plot, by multiplied adulteries and increased carnage.
"Pride and Prejudice," when first offered to Cadell, was declined by return of post. The fate of "Northanger Abbey" was still more ignominious: it was sold for ten pounds to a Bath publisher, who, after keeping it many years in his drawer, was very glad to return it and get back his ten pounds. No burst of applause greeted the works of Jane Austen like that which greeted the far inferior works of Miss Burney.Crevit occulto velut arbor oevo fama. A few years ago, the verger of Winchester cathedral asked a visitor who desired to be shown her tomb, "what there was so particular about that lady that so many people wanted to see where she was buried?" Nevertheless, she lived to feel that "her own dear children" were appreciated, if not by the vergers, yet in the right quarters, and to enjoy a quiet pleasure in the consciousness of her success. One tribute she received which was overwhelming. It was intimated to her by authority that His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, had read her novels with pleasure, and that she was at liberty to dedicate the next to him. More than this, the Royal Librarian, Mr. Clarke, of his own motion apparently, did her the honour to suggest that, changing her style for a higher, she should write "a historical romance in illustration of the august house of Cobourg," and dedicate it to Prince Leopold. She answered in effect that, if her life depended on it, she could not be serious for a whole chapter. Let it be said, however, for the Prince Regent, that underneath his royalty and his sybaritism, there was, at first, something of a better and higher nature, which at last was entirely stifled by them. His love for Mrs. Fitzherbert was not merely sensual, and Heliogabalus would not have been amused by the novels of Miss Austen.
Jane was never the authoress but when she was writing her novels; and in the few letters with which this memoir is enriched there is nothing of point or literary effort, and very little of special interest. We find, however, some pleasant and characteristic touches.
"Charles has received L30 for his share of the privateer, and expects L10 more; but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and topaz crosses for us. He must be well scolded."
"Poor Mrs. Stent! It has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody."
"We (herself and Miss A.) afterwards walked together for an hour on the Cobb; she is very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are very engaging.She seems to like people rather too easily."
Of her own works, or rather of the characters of her own creation, her Elizabeths and Emmas, Jane speaks literally as a parent. They are her "dear children." "I must confess that I think her (Elizabeth) as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not likeherat least I do not know." This is said in pure playfulness; there is nothing in the letters like real egotism or impatience of censure.
At the age of forty-two, in the prime of intellectual life, with "Emma" just out and "Northanger Abbey" coming, and in the midst of domestic affection and happiness, life must have been sweet to Jane Austen. She resigned it, nevertheless, with touching tranquillity and meekness. In 1816, it appears, she felt her inward malady, and began to go round her old haunts in a manner which seemed to indicate that she was bidding them farewell. In the next year, she was brought for medical advice to a house in the Close of Winchester, and there, surrounded to the last by affection and to the last ardently returning it, she died. Her last words were her answer to the question whether there was anything she wanted—"Nothing but death."Those who expect religious language in season and out of season have inferred from the absence of it in Jane Austen's novels that she was indifferent to religion. The testimony of her nephew is positive to the contrary; and he is a man whose word may be believed.
Those who died in the Close were buried in the cathedral. It is therefore by mere accident that Jane Austen rests among princes and princely prelates in that glorious and historic fane. But she deserves at least her slab of black marble in the pavement there. She possessed a real and rare gift, and she rendered a good account of it. If the censer which she held among the priests of art was not of the costliest, the incense was of the purest. If she cannot be ranked with the very greatest masters of fiction, she has delighted many, and none can draw from her any but innocent delight.
[Footnote: "English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley Milton. ByMark Pattison B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford." London,Macmillan, New York: Harper & Bros., 1879]
John Bright once asked a friend who was the greatest of Englishmen and the friend hesitating answered his own question by saying, "Milton, because he above all others, combined the greatness of the writer with the greatness of the citizen." Professor Masson in his Life and Times of Milton, has embodied the conception of the character indicated by this remark, but he has run into the extreme of incorporating a complete narrative of the Revolution with the biography of Milton, so that the historical portion of the work overlays instead of illuminating the biographical, and the chapters devoted specially to the life seem to the reader interpolations, and not always welcome interpolations, in an intensely interesting history of the times. But now comes a biographer in whose eyes the life of Milton the citizen is a mere episode, and not only a mere episode but a lamentable and humiliating episode, in the life of Milton the poet. Milton's life, says Mr. Pattison "is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which 'L'Allegro,' 'Il Penseroso,' and 'Lycidas' are the expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems—'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and 'Samson Agonistes'—are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone before a fallen world." As to the struggle to which Milton, with Cromwell, Vane Pym, Hampden, Selden, and Chillingworth, gave his life, it is in the eyes of his present biographer, an ignoble "fray," a "biblical brawl," and its fruits in the way of theological discussion are nothing but "garbage." To write his Defence of the English People Milton deliberately sacrificed his eyesight, his doctor having warned him that he would lose his one remaining eye if he persisted in using it for book work. "The choice lay before me," he says, "between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight. In such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from Heaven. I considered with myself that many had purchased less good with worse ill, as they who gave their lives to reap only glory, and I thereupon concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render." Mr. Pattison has quoted this passage, and no doubt he silently appreciates the heroism which breathes through it; but the "supreme duty" of which it speaks appears to him only a "prostitution of faculties" and a "poor delusion." Milton, he thinks, ought to have kept entirely aloof from the brawl and remained quiet either in the intellectual circles of Italy or in the delicious seclusion of his library at Horton, leaving liberty, truth, and righteousness to drown or to be saved from drowning by other hands than his. In "plunging into the fray" the poet miserably derogated from his superior position as a literary man, and the result was a dead loss to him and to the world. We are sure that we do not state Mr. Pattison's view more strongly than it is stated in his own pages.
The views of all of us, including Professor Masson, on such a question are sure to be more or less idiosyncratic, and those of the present biographer have not escaped the general liability. They seem, at least, aptly to represent a mood prevalent just now among eminent men of the literary class in England, particularly at the universities. These men have been tossed on the waves of Ritualism, tossed on the waves of the reaction from Ritualism; some of them have been personally battered in both controversies; they have attained no certainty, but rather arrived at the conclusion that no certainty is attainable; they are weary and disgusted; such of them as have been enthusiasts in politics have been stripped of their illusions in that line also, and have fallen back on the conviction that everything must be left to evolve itself, and that there is nothing to be done. They have withdrawn into the sanctuary of critical learning and serene art, abjuring all theology and politics, and, above all, abjuring controversy of all kinds as utterly vulgar and degrading, though, as might be expected, they are sometimes controversial and even rather tart in an indirect way, and without being conscious of it themselves. Mr. Pattison's air when he comes into contact with the politics or theology of Milton's days is like that of a very seasick passenger at the sight of a pork chop. Nor does he fail to reflect the Necessarianism of the circle. "That in selecting a scriptural subject," he says, "Milton was not, in fact, exercising any choice, but was determined by his circumstances, is only what must be said of all choosing." Criticism fastidiously erudite, a study of art religiously and almost mystically profound, are fruits of this intellectual seclusion of chosen spirits from the coarse and ruffling world for which that world has reason to be grateful. It is not likely Milton would have chosen a writer of this school as his biographer, but few men would choose their own biographers well.
Milton has at all events found in Mr. Pattison a biographer whose narrative is throughout extremely pleasant, interesting and piquant, the piquancy being enhanced for those who have the key to certain sly hits, such as that at "the peculiar form of credulity which makes perverts (to Roman Catholicism) think that everyone is about to follow their example," which carries us back to the time when the head of Tractarianism having gone over to Rome, was waiting anxiously, but in vain, for the tail to join it. The facts had already been collected by the diligence of Professor Masson, but Mr. Pattison uses them in a style which places beyond a doubt his own familiarity with the subject. Through the moral judgments there runs, as we think, and as we should have expected, a somewhat lofty conception of the privileges of intellect and of the value of literary objects compared with others, but with this qualification the reflections will probably be deemed sensible and sound. The unfortunate relations between Milton and his first wife are treated as we think all readers will say, at once with delicacy and justice. The literary criticisms are of a high order and such as only comprehensive learning combined with trained taste could produce, whether you entirely enter into all of them or not (and criticism has not yet been reduced to a certain rule) you cannot fail to gain from them increase of insight and enjoyment. They are often expressed in language of great beauty:
"The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by comparing 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of uncertain date but written after 1632 with the 'Ode on the Nativity,' written 1629. The Ode, notwithstanding its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid conceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty, as written in winter within the four walls of a college-chamber. The two idyls breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the fields around Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our language has yet found of the first charm of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset into the fields from his chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice perhaps in our lives has saluted our young senses, before their perceptions were blunted by alcohol, by lust or ambition, or diluted by the social distractions of great cities."
This will not be found to be apurpureus pannus. Nor does it much detract from the grace of the work that of the "asyntactic disorder" of which Mr. Pattison accuses Milton's prose, some examples may be found in his own. Grammatical irregularities in a really good writer, as Mr. Pattison undoubtedly is, often prove merely that his mind is more intent on the matter than on the form.
"Paradise Lost" is the subject of a learned, luminous, and to us very instructive dissertation. It is truly said that of the adverse criticism which we meet with on the poem "much resolves itself into a refusal on the part of the critic to make that initial abandonment to the conditions which the poet demands: a determination to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, principalities, and powers, shall have the same material laws which govern our planetary system." There is one criticism, however, which cannot be so resolved, and on which, as it appears to us the most serious of all, we should have liked very much to hear Mr. Pattison. It is said that Lord Thurlow and another lawyer were crossing Hounslow Heath in a post-chaise when a tremendous thunder-storm came on; that the other lawyer said that it reminded him of the battle in "Paradise Lost" between the devil and the angels, and that Thurlow roared, with a blasphemous oath, "Yes, and I wish the devil had won." Persons desirous of sustaining the religious reputation of the legal profession add that his companion jumped out of the chaise in the rain and ran away over the heath. For our part, we have never found nearly so much difficulty in any of the incongruities connected with the relations between spirit and matter, or in any confusion of the Copernican with the Ptolemaic system, as in the constant wrenching of our moral sympathies, which the poet demands for the Powers of Good, but which his own delineation of Satan, as a hero waging a Promethean war against Omnipotence, compels us to give to the Powers of Evil. Perhaps a word or two might have been said about the relations of "Paradise Lost" to other "epics." It manifestly belongs not to the same class of poems as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," or even the "AEneid." Dobson's Latin translation of it is about the greatest feat ever performed in modern Latin verse, and it shows by a crucial experiment how little Milton really has in common with Virgil. "Paradise Lost" seems to us far more akin to the Greek tragedy than to the Homeric poems or the "AEneid." In the form of a Greek drama it was first conceived. Its verse is the counterpart of the Greek iambic, not of the Greek or Latin hexameter. Had the laborious Dobson turned it into Greek iambics instead of turning it into Latin hexameters, we suspect the real affinity would have appeared.
Looking upon the life of Milton the politician merely as a sad and ignominious interlude in the life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison cannot be expected to entertain the idea that the poem is in any sense the work of the politician. Yet we cannot help thinking that the tension and elevation which Milton's nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the most serious objects, must have had not a little to do both with the final choice of his subject and with the tone of his poem. "The great Puritan epic" could hardly have been written by any one but a militant Puritan. Had Milton abjured the service of his cause, as his biographer would have had him do, he might have given us an Arthurian romance or some other poem of amusement. We even think it not impossible that he might have never produced a great poem at all, but have let life slip away in elaborate preparation without being able to fix upon a theme or brace himself to the effort of composition. If Milton's participation in a political battle fought to save at once the political and spiritual life of England was degrading, Dante's participation in the faction fight between the Guelphs and Ghibellines must have been still more so; yet if Dante had been a mere man of leisure would he have written the "Divina Commedia"? Who are these sublime artists in poetry that are pinnacled so high above the "frays" and "brawls" of vulgar humanity? The best of them, we suppose (writers for the stage being out of the question) is Goethe. Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron were all distinctly poets of the Revolution, or of the Counter-Revolution, and if you could remove from them the political element, you would rob them of half their force and interest. The great growths of poetry have coincided with the great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life have hitherto been generally periods of controversy and struggle.
Art itself, in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We have now people who profess to cultivate art as art for its own sake; but they have hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied some subjects forPunch. "He that loseth his life shall preserve it." Milton was ready to lose his literary life by sacrificing the remains of his eyesight to a cause which, upon the whole, humanity has accepted as its own; and it was preserved to him in a work which will never die. Mr. Pattison points to a short poem written by Milton when his pen was chiefly employed in serving the Commonwealth as indication that Milton "did not inwardly forfeit the peace which passeth all understanding." Why should a man forfeit that peace when he is doing with his whole soul that which he conscientiously believes to be his highest duty?
Over Milton's pamphlets Mr. Pattison can of course only wring his hands. He is at liberty to wring his hands as much as he pleases over the personalities which sullied the controversy with Salmasius; but these are a small part of the matter, particularly when they are viewed in connection with the habits of a time which was at once much rougher in phrase, though perhaps not more malicious, than ours, and given to servile imitation of Greek and Latin oratory. To point his moral more keenly, Mr. Pattison denies that Milton was ever effective as a political writer. Yet the Council of State, who can have looked to nothing but effectiveness, and were pretty good judges of it, specially invited Milton to answer "Eikon Basilike" and to plead the cause of the Regicide Republic against Salmasius in the court of European opinion. Mr. Pattison himself (p. 135) allows that on the Continent Milton was renowned as the answerer of Salmasius and the vindicator of liberty; and he proceeds to quote the statement of Milton's nephew that learned foreigners could not leave London without seeing his uncle. But the biographer has evidently laid down beforehand in his own mind general laws which are fatal to all pamphlets as pamphlets, without consideration of their particular merits. "There are," he says, "examples of thought having been influenced by books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetorical." If it were not rude to contradict, we should have said that the influence exercised in politics by scientific treatises had been as nothing in the aggregate compared with that exercised by pamphlets, speeches, and, in later times, by the newspaper press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings, but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of "Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is likeall answers, worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" is an answer, Demosthenes' "De Corona" is an answer. As a rule no doubt the form is a bad one, but an answer may embody principles and knowledge as well as show literary skill, reasoning power, and courteous self-control, which after all are not worthless though they are worth far less than some other things. These discussions so odious and contemptible in Mr. Pattison's eyes, what are they but the processes of thought through which a nation or humanity works its way to political truth? Even books scientific in form such as Hobbes's "Leviathan" or Harrington's "Oceana" are but registered results of a long discussion. "Eikon Basilike" was doing infinite mischief to the cause of the Commonwealth, and how could it have been met except by a critical reply? "Eikonoklastes" was thought, though it was not exact science, and so far as it told it was action, though it was not a pike or a musket.
This portion of Mr. Pattison's work is thickly sown with aphorisms to which no one who does not share his special mood can without qualification assent. No good man can with impunity addict himself to party, and the best men will suffer most because their conviction of the goodness of their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensibility of a poet throws himself into the excitements of a struggle he is certain to lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination which qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life unfits him for participation in that real life through the manoeuvres and compromises of which reason is the only guide and where imagination is as much misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. In this there is an element of truth but there is also something to which we are inclined to demur. If by party is meant mere faction, plainly no man can addict himself to it with impunity. But when the English nation was struggling in the grasp of a court and a prelacy which sought to reduce it to the level of Spain, no Englishman as it seems to us could with impunity perch himself aloft in a palace of art while peasants were shedding their blood to make him free. Especially do we question the soundness of the sentiment expressed in the last clause. Why is real life to be abandoned by every man of feeling and imagination and given over to the men of manoeuvre and compromise? Is not this the sentiment of the monkish ascetic coming back to us in another form and enjoining us to make ourselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Art's sake? Cromwell, Vane, Hampden, and Pym were not men of manoeuvre and compromise, they had plenty of feeling and imagination, though in them these qualities gave birth not to poetry, but to high political or religious aspirations and grand social ideals. The theory of Milton's biographer is that an active interest in public affairs is fatal to excellence in literature or in art; and this theory seems to be confuted as signally as possible by the facts of Milton's life.
It is curious to see how completely at variance Milton's own sentiment is with that of his biographer and how little he foresaw what Mr. Pattison would say about him. In theDefensio Secundahe defends himself against the charge not of over activity but of inaction. "I can easily repel," he says, "any imputation of want of courage or of want of zeal. For though I did not share the toils or perils of the war I was engaged in a service not less hazardous to myself and more beneficial to my fellow citizens; nor in the adverse turns of our affairs, did I ever betray any symptoms of pusillanimity and dejection; or show myself more afraid than became me of malice or of death: For since from my youth I was devoted to the pursuits of literature, and my mind has always been stronger than my body, I did not court the labours of a camp, in which any common person would have been of more service than myself, but resorted to that employment in which my exertions were likely to be of most avail. Thus, with the better part of my frame I contributed as much as possible to the good of my country, and to the success of the glorious cause in which we were engaged; and I thought that if God willed the success of such glorious achievements, it was equally agreeable to his will that there should be others by whom those achievements should be recorded with dignity and elegance; and that the truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be defended by reason; which is the best and only legitimate means of defending it. Hence, while I applaud those who were victorious in the field, I will not complain of the province which was assigned me; but rather congratulate myself upon it, and thank the author of all good for having placed me in a station, which may be an object of envy to others rather than of regret to myself." Here is a culprit who entirely mistakes the nature of his offence and instead of apologizing for what he has done apologizes for not having done more. Nor so far as we are aware is there in Milton's writings the slightest trace of sorrow for the misemployment of his best years or consciousness of the ruin which it had wrought in his genius as a poet.
In the same spirit Mr. Pattison continually represents the end of Milton's public life as "the irretrievable discomfiture of all his hopes, aims, and aspirations," his labour as "being swept away without a trace of it being left," and the latter part of his life as utter "wretchedness." The failure of selfish schemes often makes men wretched. The failure of unselfish aspirations may make a man sad, but can never make him wretched, and Milton was not wretched when he was writing "Paradise Lost." He would not have been wretched even if the discomfiture of his hopes for the Commonwealth had been as final and as irretrievable as his biographer supposes. But Milton knew that though disastrous it was not final or irretrievable. He had implicit confidence in the indestructibility of moral force, and he "bated no jot of heart or hope." He could see the limits of the reaction and he knew that, though great and calamitous in proportion to the errors of the Republican party, it had not changed in a day the character and fundamental tendencies of the nation. He would note that the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North, the legislative functions once usurped by the Privy Council, were not restored, and that no attempt was made to govern without a parliament. He found himself the defender of regicide, not free from peril, indeed, yet protected by public opinion, while, in general, narrow bounds were set to the bloodthirsty vengeance of the Cavaliers. He lived to witness the actual turn of the tide. Six years before his death the Triple Alliance was formed, and in the year of his death the Cabal Ministry fell. At worst, his case would have been that of a soldier killed in an unfortunate crisis of a battle which in the end was won, but he fell, if not with the shout of victory in his ears, with the inspiring signs of a general advance around him. If we take remoter ages into our view, the triumph of Milton is still more manifest. The cause to which he gave his life and his genius is forever exalted and dignified by his name. The notion that the Cavaliers were the men of culture and that the Puritans were the uncultivated has been a hundred times confuted, though it reappears in the discourses of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and, what is much more astonishing, in this work of Mr. Pattison. But in a party of action great defect of culture would be amply redeemed by the possession of a Milton.
[Footnote: A Memoir of the Rev. J. Keble, M.A., late Vicar of Hursley, by the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge, D.C.L., Oxford and London: James Parker & Co., 1869.]
SIR JOHN COLERIDGE, the writer of this "Life of Keble," was for many years one of the Judges of the Court of Queen's Bench, is now a Privy Councillor, and may be regarded almost as the lay head of the High Church party in England. Sharing Keble's opinions, and entering into all his feelings, he is at the same time himself always a man of the world and a man of sense. Add to these qualifications his intimate and lifelong friendship with the subject of his work, and we have reason to expect a biography at once appreciative and judicial. Such a biography, in fact, we have; one full of sympathy, yet free from exaggeration, and a good lesson to biographers in general. The intimacy of the friendship between the writer and his subject might have interfered with his impartiality and repelled our confidence if the case had been more complex and had made greater demands on the inflexibility of the judge. But in the case of a character and a life so perfectly simple, pure, and transparent as the character and the life of Keble, there was but one thing to be said.
The author of "The Christian Year" was the son of a country clergyman of the Church of England, and was educated at home by his father, so that he missed, or, as he would probably have said himself, escaped, the knowledge of minds differently trained from his own which a boy cannot help picking up at an English public school. At a very early age he became a scholar of Corpus Christi, a very small and secluded college of the High Church and High Tory University of Oxford. As the scholarships led to fellowships—the holders of which were required to be in holy orders—and to church preferment, almost all the scholars were destined for the clerical profession. Of Keble's student friendships one only seems to have been formed outside the walls of his own college, and this was with Miller, a student of Worcester College, who afterwards became a High Church clergyman. Among the students destined for the Anglican priesthood in the Junior Common Room of Corpus Christi College, there was indeed one whose presence strikes us like the apparition of Turnus in the camp of AEneas—Thomas Arnold. Arnold was already Arnold, and he succeeded in drawing the young champions of the divine right of kings and priests into a struggle against the divine right of tutors which 'secured the liberty of the subject' at Corpus—the question at issue between the subject and the ruler being by which of two clocks, one of which was always five minutes before the other, the recitations should begin. The friendship between Arnold and Keble, however, was merely personal, Arnold evidently never exercised the slightest influence over Keble's mind, and even in this 'great rebellion'—the only rebellion, great or small, of his life—Keble was induced to take part, as he has expressly recorded, at the instigation of Coleridge, a middle term between Arnold and himself. The college teachers were all clergymen and the university curriculum in their days was regulated and limited by clerical ascendancy, and consisted of the Aristotelian and Butlerian philosophy, classics, and pure mathematics, without modern history or physical science. The remarkable precocity of Keble's intellect enabled him to graduate with the highest honours both in classics and mathematics at an age almost miraculously early even when allowance is made for the comparative youthfulness of students in general in those days. He was at once elected a Fellow of Oriel, and translated to the Senior Common Room of the College—another clerical society consisting of men for the most part considerably his seniors, among whom, in spite of the presence of Whately, High Church principles probably predominated already, and were destined soon to predominate in the most extreme sense, for the college presently became the focus of the Ritualistic and Romanizing movement. Thus, up to twenty-three, Keble's life had been that of a sort of acolyte, and though not ascetic (for his nature appears to have been always genial and mirthful), entirely clerical in its environments and its aspirations. At twenty-three he took orders, and put round his neck, with the white tie of Anglican priesthood, the Thirty-nine Articles, the whole contents of the Anglican Prayer Book and all the contradictions between those two standards of belief. For some time he held a tutorship in his college then he went down to a country living in the neighbourhood of a cathedral city, where he spent the rest of his days. His character was so sweet and gentle that he could not fail to be naturally disposed to toleration. He even goes the length of saying that some profane libellers whom his friend Coleridge was going to prosecute, were not half so dangerous enemies to religion as some wicked worldly-minded Christians. But it is no wonder, and implies no derogation from his charity, that he should have regarded the progress of opinions different from his own as a mediaeval monk would have regarded the progress of an army of Saracens or a horde of Avars. His poetic sympathies could not hinder him from disliking the rebel and Puritan Milton.
Thus it was impossible that he should be in a very broad sense a poet of humanity. His fundamental conception of the world was essentially mediaeval, his ideal was that of cloistered innocence or, still better, the innocence of untempted and untried infancy. For such perfection his Lyra Innocentium was strung. When his friend is thinking of the profession of the law, he conjures him to forego the brilliant visions which tempted him in that direction for "visions far more brilliant and more certain too, more brilliant in their results, inasmuch as the salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing the Magna Charta of a thousand worlds, more certain to take place since temptations are fewer and opportunities everywhere to be found. These words remind us of a passage in one of Massillon's sermons, preached on the delivery of colours to a regiment, in which the bishop after dwelling on the hardships and sufferings which soldiers are called upon to endure, intimates that a small part of those hardships and sufferings, undergone in performance of a monastic vow, would merit the kingdom of heaven. If souls are to be saved by real moral influences, Sir John Coleridge has probably saved a good many more souls as a religious judge and man of the world than he would have saved as the rector of a country parish, and if character is formed by moral effort, he has probably formed a much higher character by facing temptation than he would have done by flying from it. Keble himself, in his Morning Hymn, has a passage in a different strain, but the sentiment which really prevailed with him was probably that embodied in his advice to his friend.
Whatever of grace, worth, or beneficence there could be in the half cloistered life of an Oxford fellow of those days or in the rural and sacerdotal life of a High Church rector, there was in the life of Keble at Oriel, and afterwards at Hursley. The best spirit of such a life together with the image of a character rivalling in spiritual beauty, after its kind that of Ken or Leighton, is found in Keble's poetry, and for this we may be, as hundreds of thousands have been, thankful.
The biographer declines to enter into a critical examination of the "Christian Year," but he confidently predicts its indefinite reign, founding his prediction on the causes of its original success. He justly describes it, in effect as rather a poetical manual of devotion than a book of poetry for continuous reading It is in truth, so completely out of the category of ordinary poetry that to estimate its poetic merits would be a very difficult task. Sir John Coleridge indicates this, when he cites as an appropriate tribute to the excellence of the book the practice of the clergyman who used, every Sunday afternoon instead of a sermon to read and interpret to his congregation the poem of the Christian Year for the day. The object of the present publication says the Preface will be attained if any person find assistance from it in bringing his own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those recommended and exemplified in the Prayer Book. This connection with the Prayer Book and with the Anglican Calendar, while it has given the book an immense circulation necessarily limits its range and interest. Yet those who care least for being brought into unison with the Prayer Book fully admit that the "Christian Year" gives proof of real poetic power. Keble himself, as his biographer attests, had a very humble opinion of his own work, seldom read it hated to hear it praised consented with great difficulty to its glorification by sumptuous editions. It was his saintly humility suggests the biographer which made him feel that the book which flowed from his own heart would inevitably be taken for a faithful likeness of himself, that he would thus be exhibiting himself in favourable colours and be in danger of incurring the woe pronounced on those who win the good opinion of the world. If this account be true it is another proof of the mediaeval and half monastic mould in which Keble's religious character was cast.
The comparative failure of the "Lyra Innocentium" is probably to be attributed not only to its inferiority in intrinsic merit but to the fact that whereas the "Christian Year" has as little of a party character as any work of devotion written by an Anglican and High Church clergyman could have, the "Lyra Innocentium" was the work of a leading party man. The interval between the two publications had been filled by a great reactionary movement among the clergy, one of the back-streams to that current of Liberalism, which setting in after the termination of the great French war, not only swept away the Rotten boroughs and the other political bulwarks of Tory dominion but threatened to sweep away the privileges of the Established Church, and compelled Churchmen to look out for a basis independent of State support. Keble was the associate of Hurrell Froude, Newman Pusey and the other great Tractarians. A sermon which he preached before the University of Oxford was regarded by Newman as the beginning of the movement. He contributed to the Tracts for the Times, though as a controversialist he was never powerful, sweetness not strength being the characteristic of his mind. He gradually embraced, as it seems to us, all the principles which sent his fellow Tractarians over to Rome. The posthumous alteration made in the Christian Year by his direction shows that he held a doctrine respecting the Eucharist not practically distinguishable from the Roman doctrine of Transubstantiation. A poem intended to appear in the "Lyra Apostolica" but suppressed at the time in deference to the wishes of cautious friends and now published by his biographer proves that he was, as a Protestant putting it plainly would say, an advanced Mariolater. He was a thoroughgoing sacerdotalist and believer in the authority of the Church in matters of opinion. He mourned over the abandonment of auricular confession. He regarded the cessation of prayers for the souls of dead founders and benefactors as a lamentable concession to Protestant prejudice. Like his associates he repudiated the very name of Protestant. He deemed the state of the Church of England with regard to orthodoxy most deplorable—two prelates having distinctly denied an article of the Apostles Creed and matters going on altogether so that it was very difficult for a Catholic Christian to remain in that communion. Why then did he not with Newman and the rest accept the logical conclusions of his premises and go to the place to which his principles belonged? His was not a character to be influenced by any worldly motives or even by that sense of ecclesiastical position which perhaps has sometimes had its influence in making Romanizing leaders of the Anglican clergy unwilling to merge their party and their leadership in the Church of Rome. There was nothing in his nature which would have recoiled from any self abnegation or submission. The real answer is we believe that Keble was a married man. We can hardly imagine him making love. His marriage was no doubt one not of passion but of affection, as small a departure from the sacerdotal ideal as it was possible for a marriage to be. Still, he was married and tenderly attached to his good wife. Thus it was probably not any subtle distinction between Real Presence and Transubstantiation, not misgivings as to the exact degree of worship to be paid to the Virgin, not doubts as to the limits of the personal infallibility of the Pope or objections to practical abuses in the Church of Rome—which kept Keble and has kept many a Romanizing clergyman of the Anglican Church from becoming a Roman Catholic. Nor is the reason when analysed one of which Anglican philosophy need be ashamed for to the pretentions of sacerdotal asceticism the best answer is domestic love.
Keble stopped his ears with wax against the siren appeal of his seceding chief John Henry Newman and refused at first to read the Essay on Development. When at last he was drawn into the controversy he constructed for his own satisfaction and that of other waverers who looked up to him for support and guidance an argument founded on the Butlerian principle of probability as the guide of life. But Butler, with all deference to his great name be it said, imports into questions of conscience and into the spiritual domain a principle really applicable only to worldly concerns. A man will invest his money or take any other step in relation to his worldly affairs as he thinks the chances are in his favour, but he cannot be satisfied with a mere preponderance of chances that he possesses vital truth and that he will escape everlasting condemnation. The analogy drawn by Keble between the late recognition of the Prayer Book instead of the too Protestant Articles as the real canon of the Anglican faith and the lateness of the Christian Revelation in the world's history was an application of the analogical method of reasoning which showed to what strange uses that method might be put.
It is singular but consistent with our theory as to the real nature of the tie which prevented Keble from joining the secession that he should have determined if compelled to leave the Church of England (a contingency which from the growth of heresy in that Church he distinctly contemplated) to go not into the communion of the Church of Rome but out of all communion whatever. He would have gone we suppose into some limbo like the phantom Church of the Nonjurors. It is difficult to see how such a course can have logically commended itself to the mind of any member of the theological school which held that the individual reason afforded no sort of standing ground and that the one thing indispensable to salvation was visible communion with the true Church.
Sir John Coleridge deals with the question as to the posthumous alteration in "The Christian Year" the discovery of which caused so much scandal among its Protestant admirers and brought to a stand, it was said, the subscription for a memorial college in honour of its author. It is made clearly to appear that the alteration was in accordance with Keble's expressed desire, and the suspicion which was cast upon his executors and those who were about him in his last moments is proved to be entirely unfounded. But, on the other hand, we cannot think that the biographer (or rather Keble, who speaks for himself in this matter) will be successful in convincing many people that the alteration was merely verbal. The mental interpolation of "only" after "not" in the words "not in the Hands," is surely atour de force, and it must be remembered that the passage occurs in the lines on the "Gunpowder Treason," and is evidently pointed against the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. The Roman Catholics do not deny that the Eucharist is received "in the heart," but the Protestants deny that it is is received "in the hands" at all, and the vast majority of Keble's readers could not fail to construe the passage as an assertion of the Protestant doctrine. Sir John Coleridge does not confront the real difficulty, because he does not give the two versions side by side, or exhibit the passage in its context. A more natural account of the matter is suggested by a letter of Keble, written when he was contemplating the publication of the "Lyra Innocentium," and included in the present memoir. In that letter he says:
"No doubt, there would be the difference in tone which you take notice of between this and the former book, for when I wrote that, I did not understand (to mention no more points) either the doctrine of Repentanceor that of the Holy Eucharist, as held,e. g., by Bishop Ken, nor that of Justification, and such points as these must surely make a great difference. But may it please God to preserve me from writing so unreally and deceitfully as I did then, and if I could tell you the whole of my shameful history, you would join with all your heart in this prayer."
The biographer, while he proves his integrity by giving us the letter, of course protests against our taking seriously the self accusations of a saint. We certainly shall not take seriously any charge of deceitfulness against Keble, whether made by himself or by any other human being, but he was liable, to a certain extent, like all other human beings, to self-deception. His opinions, like those of his associates, on theological questions in general and on the question of the Eucharist in particular, had been moving rapidly in a Romanizing direction during the interval between the publication of "The Christian Year" and that of the "Lyra Innocentium." In the passage just quoted, we see that he was conscious of this, but it was not unnatural that he should sometimes forget it, and that he should then put upon the words in "The Christian Year" a construction in conformity with his opinions as they were in their most advanced stage. It is strange, however, that he and the rest of his party, if they were even dimly and at intervals conscious of the fact that their own creed had undergone so much change, should still have been able to take the ground of immutability and infallibility in their controversies with other parties and churches.
It has been almost forgotten that Keble held for ten years a (non- resident) Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. His lectures were unfortunately written, as the rule of the Chair then was, in Latin. He thought of translating them, and Sir John Coleridge seems still to hold that the task would be worth undertaking. For the examples, which are taken from the Greek and Latin poets, it would be necessary to substitute translations or examples taken from the modern poets. Mr. Gladstone chooses, the apt epithet when he calls the lectures "refined." Refinement rather than vigour or depth was always the attribute of Keble's productions. His view of poetry, however, as the vent for overcharged feelings or an imagination oppressed by its own fulness—as avis medica, to use his own expression—if it does not cover the whole ground, well deserves attention among other theories.
To the discredit, perhaps, rather of the dogmatic spirit than of either of the persons concerned, religious differences were allowed to interfere with he personal friendship formed in youth between Keble and Arnold. With this single and slight exception, Keble's character in every relation—as friend, son, husband, tutor, pastor—seems to have been all that the admirers of "The Christian Year" can expect or desire. The current of his life, but for the element of theological controversy and perplexity which slightly disturbed his later days, would have been limpid and tranquil as that of any rivulet in the quiet scene where the years of his Christian ministry were passed. He and his wife, the partner of all his thoughts and labours, and the mirror and partaker of the beauty of his character, died almost on the same day; she dying last, and rejoicing that her husband was spared the pain of being the survivor.
"Within these walls [of the Church] each fluttering guestIs gently lured to one safe nest—Without 'tis moaning and unrest."
The writer of those lines perfectly as well as beautifully realized his ideal.