"Flowers I would bring. If flowers could make thee fairer.And make, if the muse were dear to thee;(For loving these would make thee love the bearer.)But sweetest songs forget their melody,And loveliest flowers would but conceal the wearer:A rose I marked, and might have plucked; but sheBlushed as she bent, imploring me to spare her,Nor spoil her beauty by such rivalry.Alas! and with what gifts shall I pursue thee.What offerings bring, what treasures lay before thee;When earth with all her floral train doth woo thee,And all old poets and old books adore thee;And love to thee is naught; from passionate moodSecured by joy's complacent plenitude?"
This poem is remarkable to us as containing one of the few recognitions we have ever seen of that beauty which rises above the province of passion, and strikes a dim awe into admiration. They are not many who can feel it, and few, indeed, who have expressed it. The same thought occurs in another passage referred to by Landor:
"Men loved; but hope they deemed to beA sweet impossibility."
But we have a further reason for preferring this to several equally fine. It is to note what may be another of De Vere's unconscious adaptations. The well-known scholar, Henry of Huntington, addressed to Queen Adelicia of Louvaine some lines which hinge upon the very same turn of thought. The real excellence of the verses emboldens us to subjoin a few of them, that the reader may observe the resemblance:
"Anglorum regina, tuos, Adeliza, decoresIpsa rcferre parans Musa stupore riget.Quid diadema tibi, pulcherrima? quid tibi gemma?Pallet gemma tibi, nec diadema nitet.Ornamenta cave; nec quicquam luminis indeAccipis; illa nitent lumine clara tuo . . . ."
We are not sure but the mediaeval poet, having no further idea beyond mere laudation, has rather the better of the complimenting. But then praise to a queen would be flattery to a subject.
Without trying the rather dubious policy of attempting to prove our taste, we think that upon these sonnets alone we could rest De Vere's claim to be a first-class sonnet writer. If it were not a received impossibility, we should be tempted to call him the equal in this respect of Shakespeare. Of course we admit the impossibility.
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Leaving the sonnets, we come to a far more interesting portion of the works before us—the religious poems. As a Christian, our author is indeed admirable. He evinces not only a deep, strong, real, and realizing faith, but much fruitful thought over the mental details, so to speak, and a wonderful comprehension of the theory, theology, and mysteries of the church.
More properly than religious poems, we should speak of poems on religion; for the man's whole life is a religious poem. Scarcely a scrap is not full of his deep Catholicity. Of verses specially and professedly devotional, these volumes contain few, besides the May Carols, save some Poems on Sacred Subjects, which we find below the author's average. Some of them carry abstractness to the verge of vagary. What color of pretence, for instance, has a man for printing (if hemustwrite it), and deliberately inviting the public to read, a copy of verses on the Unity of Abstract Truth? We internally know we are not Wordsworths, but it is very unpleasant to have it made so plain. In shrewd anticipation of any mental queries, we utterly decline saying whether we have read the lines or not. We cannot determine which would be the more to our credit.
But we pass by unnumbered beauties to reach our author's best and most memorable work—May Carols. This is noble alike in design, tone, and execution. The plan is simple—to produce a series of poems in honor of the Blessed Virgin, graduating poetical expositions of her relations to faith according to the progress of her month of May. It is just the topic for him, and the result is the most beautiful development of the entire subject that can be imagined. We have no words for the subtlety and success with which the individualities of Mary and Jesus are wrought out. The man who, without seeking adventitious aid by startling and shocking the habits of Christian thought and Christian reverence, can so draw a portrait of the Saviour, has in this alone deserved the thanks of the ages as a standard-bearer on the march of the hosts of God. These great delineations form the first and main function of the whole work. We cannot set forth his purpose more lucidly than in his own words, as we find them in the preface:
"The wisdom of the church, which consecrates the fleeting seasons of time to the interests of eternity, has dedicated the month of May (the birth-day festival, as it were, of creation) to her who was ever destined in the divine counsels to become the Mother of her Creator. It belongs to her, of course, as she is the representative of the incarnation, and its practical exponent to a world but too apt to forget what it professes to hold. The following poems, written in her honor, are an attempt to set forth, though but in mere outline, each of them some of the great ideas or essential principles embodied in that all-embracing mystery. On a topic so comprehensive, converse statements, at one time illustrating highest excellence compatible with mere creaturely existence, at another, the infinite distance between the chief of earthly creatures and the Creator, may seem, at first sight, and to some eyes, contradictory, although in reality mutually correlative. On an attentive perusal, however, that harmony which exists among the many portions of a single mastering truth can hardly fail to appear, and with it the scope and aim of this poem."
This certainly is aiming high. Not only does the poet include in his plan the moral delineation of her whom the church holds the highest type of created humanity; he scales the heavens themselves. But our author is impious Enceladus crushed beneath his own presumption, but a Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, and rising to the infinite sky in beatific visions. Perhaps we best realize the boldness of the enterprise when we think for how many centuries the praise of the Mother and Son has exhausted thought and imagination of the greatest souls. He is a daring gleaner who follows the fathers of the church over their chosen fields. Yet the May{79}Carols are a sheaf from the same golden foison where Augustine and Aquinas and Chrysostom led the reapers. How fruitful must be the soil!
We have never seen anything to compare with the picture of the Holy Child here presented, unless it be the picture of the Holy Mother. We cannot, in our allotted space, render all the admirable gradations and delicate shadings, but must cull with difficult choice one or two only. One of the first is the
MATER CHRISTIDaily beneath his mother's eyesHer lamb maturity his lowliness:'Twas hers the lovely sacrificeWith fillet and with flower to dress.Beside his little cross he knelt,With human-heavenly lips he prayed;His will with in her will she felt,And yet his will her will obeyed. . . .He willed to lack; he willed to bear;He willed by suffering to be schooled;He willed the chains of flesh to wear;Yet from her arms the world he ruled.As tapers 'mid the noontide glowWith merged yet separate radiance burn,With human taste and touch, even so,The things he knew he willed to learn.He sat beside the lowly door:Hishomelesseyes appeared to traceIn evening skies remembered lore,And shadows of his Father's face.One only knew him. She aloneWho nightly to his cradle crept.Andlying like the moonbeam proneWorshipped her Maker as he slept.
Whoever can read that without admiring it, is a clod: whoever can read it without having his whole idea of Christ's childhood intensely vivified and expanded, must be a St. John or an angel. How beautiful, and, when we look at it, how bold is the epithet "homeless!" How exactly it embodies the longing of his spirit out of its human prison toward the freedom of the heavens! Yet how daringly true to imagine the omnipresent Deity homeless! Again, how acutely the last scene characterizes the tender timidity of Mary's mother-love, and how natural and intensely human the conscious, sweet self-deception which brought her to worship when only the humanity slept, and she seemed separated from her Son and alone with her Creator! But the simile of the taper is perhaps the best touch of all, as being the masterly expression of one of the most subtle and difficult conceptions of the human mind. It must divide the honors of comparison with the concluding lines of the
MATER SALVATORIS.O heart with his in just accord!O soul his echo, tone for tone!O spirit that heard, and kept his word!O countenance moulded like his own!Behold, she seemed on earth to dwell;But, hid in light, alone she satBeneath the throne ineffable,Chanting her clear magnificat.Fed from the boundless heart of God,The Joy within her rose more high.And all her being overflowed,Until the awful hour was nigh.Then, then there crept her spirit o'erThe shadow of that pain world-wide,Whereof her Son the substance bore;—Him offering, half in him she died.Standing like that strange moon, whereonThe mask of earth lies dim and dead,An orb of glory, shadow-strewn,Yet girdled with a luminous thread.
For originality, and perfect expression of an idea by an image, we know of nothing better in all our range of poetry than those two similes. That last is especially wonderful for its reconditeness. Who would ever think of an annular eclipse of the moon as an illustration of religion? And yet how marvellously well it does illustrate! The first verse of the poem is very poor and strained in its rhythm, and the second not much better in its mysticism, which is rather adapted to the enthusiasm of the middle ages; but the end counterbalances all.
Having thus digressed to the Blessed Virgin, we go on to note in how many lights these poems display her. The idea of her they present is, to an ordinary idea, as the flashing, many-faceted jewel to the rough gem of the mines. Here, for example, the whole poetry of motherhood is pressed into her service in a few dense lines:
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O Mother-Maid! to none save theeBelongs in full a parent's name:So faithful thy virginity,Thy motherhood so pure from blame!All other parents, what are they?Thy types. In them thou stood'st rehearsed,(As they in bird, and bud, and spray).Thine Antitype? The Eternal First!Prime Parent He: and next Him thou!Overshadowed by the Father's Might,Thy 'Fiat' was thy bridal vow;Thine offspring He, the "Light of Light."Her Son Thou wert: her Son Thou art,O Christ! Her substance fed Thy growth:—She shaped Thee in her virgin heart,Thy Mother and Thy Father both!
Let us pass on from this, without breaking the continuity, to
CONSERVABAT IN CORDE.As every change of April skyIs imaged in a placid brook,Her meditative memoryMirrored His every deed and look.As suns through summer ether rolledMature each growth the spring has wrought,So Love's strong day-star turned to goldHer harvests of quiescent thought.Her soul was as a vase, and shoneTranslucent to an inner ray;Her Maker's finger wrote thereonA mystic Bible new each day.Deep Heart! In all His sevenfold mightThe Paraclete with thee abode;And, sacramented there in light,Bore witness of the things of God.
The last verse has a flaw rare in these volumes—a mixture of metaphors. In the first two lines, "heart" is strongly personified, and clearly represents Mary herself. In the third with no intimation whatever, and without a break in the construction of the sentence, the same heart is become a place, and is indicated by "there." We cannot imagine how the author, with his susceptible taste, read it over in the proof-sheets without feeling the jar of the phrases.
So much for the loving side of Mary's character. In depicting her suffering, the poet has even excelled this. The first broad stroke of his picture is
MATER DOLOROSAShe stood: she sank not. Slowly fellAdown the Cross the atoning blood.In agony ineffableShe offered still His own to God.No pang of His her bosom spared;She felt in Him its several power.But she in heart His Priesthood shared:She offered Sacrifice that hour. . . .
Beautifully our author hag named the succeeding poem also Mater Dolorosa. The one is the agony of loss, the other the bitterness of bereavement:
From her He passed: yet still with herThe endless thought of Him found rest;A sad but sacred branch of myrrhFor ever folded in her breast.A Boreal winter void of light—So seemed her widowed days forlorn:She slept; but in her breast all nightHer heart lay waking till the morn.Sad flowers on Calvary that grew;—Sad fruits that ripened from the Cross;—These were the only joys she knew:Yet all but these she counted loss.Love strong as Death! She lived through theeThat mystic life whose every breathFrom Life's low harp-string amorouslyDraws out the sweetened name of Death.Love stronger far than Death or Life!Thy martyrdom was o'er at lastHer eyelids drooped; and without strifeTo Him she loved her spirit passed.
For once we can leave the of a poem to the unaided italics with a good grace. To expound the exquisiteness of these lines would be like botanically dissecting a lily. But there is a deeper underlying excellence that may perhaps not suggest itself so irresistibly—the marvellous intuitive delicacy of the whole conception embodied by this poem. Only a truly profound religious feeling could thus happily have characterized the effect of such a sorrow on such a nature. A mere pietist would have painted a sanctified apathy; a merely smart writer would have imbued her with an eagerness for the end of earthly trouble; a man of talent would have made her resigned to death; the man of genius makes her resignedto life. Here is the effortless exactness of true poet.
Two more views, and we can turn from this picture of the Blessed Virgin of the May Carols—one, her human and inferior relation to God; and the other, her human and superior relation to ourselves. To the first point, perhaps the most explicit of the poems is the following, which, also, is a good example of the author s peculiar, sudden manner of turning his broad philosophy into the channel of some forcible application:
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Not all thy purity, althoughThe whitest moon that ever litThe peaks of Lebanonian snowShone dusk and dim compared with it;—Not that great love of thine, whose beamsTranscended in their virtuous heatThose suns which melt the ice-bound streams,And make earth's pulses newly beat:—It was not these that from the skyDrew down to thee the Eternal Word:He looked on thy humility;He knew thee, "Handmaid of thy Lord."Let no one claim with thee a part;Let no one, Mary, name thy name,While, aping God, upon his heartPride sits, a demon robed in flame.Proud Vices, die! Where Sin has placeBe Sin's familiar self-disgust.Proud Virtues, doubly die; that GraceAt last may burgeon from your dust.
But the poem which of all most truly, tenderly, and perfectly develops the whole beautiful spiritual dependence of the true Catholic upon the Mother of his God, is the Mater Divinae Gratis, already published in The Catholic World for May, p. 216.
The beauty of this piece has already attracted wide attention. The wonder is that any Catholic could have passed it by. It is a theological treatise in itself. Could all the repositories of divinity furnish a more complete reputation of those cold and narrow organisms (we hesitate to call them hearts) whose breasts would seem to have room for just so much piety, of a prescribed quality and regulation pattern, and who insist that every one we love is a unit in the divisor which assigns to each his portion of that known and limited store, our affection? These people sincerely cannot see how one can love Mary too without loving God less. It is as if a tree could not strike another root without sapping its trunk. Perish this narrowness! How long before these strait-laced souls—the moral progeny of that unhappiest of men, Calvin—will learn to love God as well as believe in him?
There is something very difficult of analysis about the power of these poems. They have none of that dramatic force which consists in skilfully selecting and emphasizing the striking sonnets of the situation. De Vere's strength does not seem to tend toward the outward personality, but rather lies in the direction of the soul and its sensations. When we lay down the May Carols, we do not conceive a whit the more clearly how the Virgin Mary looked; there is no impression to overlie and mar our memories of the great painters' pictures of her. But we cannot read aright without bearing away an expanded comprehension and near, real, vivid insight into her love, her pain, her humility, her deserving, her glory. We so enter in spirit into the scenes of her life as absolutely to lose sight of the surroundings. This kind of power may not be the most broadly effective, but we must admit that it reaches our admiration through our best faculties. Its secret lies in the fact that the author's own ideas both of Christ and his Mother are so complete and exalted. At what advantage, for example, he stands over the author of Ecce Homo, who, it seems, would have us believe Christ in his childhood to have been a Hebrew boy, much like other Hebrew boys, till ill-explained causes metamorphosed a Galilean peasant youth into the most transcendent genius of history! With this cold casuistic theory compare De Vere's picture of the mother lying worshipping by the moonlit cradle of her Son and God. He accepts in their entirety the received ideas of the church, neither varying nor wishing to vary one jot or tittle of the law, but lovingly investing it with all the developments of thought and all the decorations of fancy. No Catholic can help being struck by the singular doctrinal accuracy which pervades without perturbing the whole of this work. The result is a portraiture of the incarnation and the Blessed Virgin, such as an author who could set all the ruggedness of Calvary before our eyes, and make every waving olive-leaf in Gethsemane musically mournful in our souls, could not hope to rival by all the efforts of graphic genius.
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But scarcely less remarkable is the success in the other grand aim of the May Carols—what he himself calls "an attempt at a Christian rendering of external nature." His attempt has brought forth a series of purely descriptive pieces, interspersed at intervals, intended to present the symbolism which the aspect of May's successive phases might offer to the imagination of faith. To cultivate Christianity in the shifting soil of fancy is of itself a bold endeavor; but when the method proposed is by picturing the delicate and evanescent shades of spring's advance, the difficulty can be realized.
How far the author succeeds in this most subtle undertaking of educing the symbolism of May, we must leave to country criticism for final adjudication. We have our opinion; we can discover many sweet emblems; but we cannot analyze or reason out our thoughts satisfactorily. We recognize portraits in the May-gallery, but are not familiar enough with nature's costumes to judge of the historical order. We can exult with the earth in the gladness of the season; we are permeated in a measure, as are all, with the influences of the bluer skies, the softer breezes, the more confident advance of the flowers. But when it comes to reading the succession of the changing clouds, harmonizing the melody of the gales, deciphering the hieroglyphics that spring's myriad fingers write in verdure on the woods and meadows, we feel that ours is but a city acquaintance with May. We have rested too well content with the beauty to think of its moral suggestiveness or significance.
But this we do know, that the author has struck such a vein of descriptive felicity that, according to Dr. Holmes's witty logic, he can afford to write no more description till he dies. There are touches of this here and there in other places, but nothing to promise such little gems of landscape as stud the May Carols. There is an accession of naturalness and a flow of happy phrases as soon as he reaches one of these themes, that is like swimming out of fresh water into salt. Take for instance, this:
When April's sudden sunset coldThrough boughs half-clothed with watery sheenBursts on the high, new-cowslipped wold,And bathes a world half gold half green,Then shakes the illuminated airWith din of birds; the vales far downGrow phosphorescent here and there;Forth flash the turrets of the town;Along the sky thin vapors scud;Bright zephyrs curl the choral main;The wild ebullience of the bloodRings joy-bells in the heart and brain:Yet in that music discords mix;The unbalanced lights like meteors play;And, tired of splendors that perplex,The dazzled spirit sighs for May.
It is a great disadvantage to these beautiful little poems to be thus taken from their frames, thereby losing their emblematic and retaining only their intrinsic beauty. But even so, there are two more which we fearlessly present on the merit of their own unaided charms. Here is the first:
Brow-bound with myrtle and with gold,Spring, sacred now from blasts and blights,Lifts in a firm, untrembling holdHer chalice of fulfilled delights.Confirmed around her queenly lipThe smile late wavering, on she moves;And seems through deepening tides to stepOf steadier joys and larger loves.The stony Ash itselfrelents,Into the blue embrace of MaySinking, like old impenitentsHeart-touched at last;and, far away,The long wave yearns along the coastWith sob suppressed, like that which thrills(While o'er the altar mounts the Host)Some chapel on the Irish hills.
We scarcely know which to admire most, the precise, clear-cut elegance of the opening personification, the beauty of the third verse, or the melody (how the first line matches the sense!) and admirable comparison in the last one. Only, if the poet had ever waded among the waves of bloom of our western prairies, he would have found a better expression than the awkward one of "deepening tides," which is out of character with the rest.
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But the last one we give is the finest. We had put it in the first rank ourselves before finding that it had also struck the fine ear of Mr. Landor. It is a Claude Lorraine done into verse:
Pleasant the swarm about the bough;The meadow-whisper round the woods;And for their coolness pleasant nowThe murmur of the falling floods.Pleasant beneath the thorn to lie,And let a summer fancy loose;To hear the cuckoo's double cry;To make the noon-tide sloth's excuse.Panting, but pleased, the cattle standKnee-deep in water-weed and sedge,And scarcely crop the greener bandOf osiers round the river's edge.But hark! Far off the south wind sweepsThe golden-foliaged groves among,Renewed or lulled, with rests and leaps—Ah! how it makes the spirit longTo drop its earthly weight, and driftLike yon white cloud, on pinions free,Beyond that mountain's purple rift,And o'er that scintillating sea!
We do not think we can say anything that will add to this.
There are two very noticeable faults of detail in the May Carols. One is the great occasional looseness of rhyme. We are no lover even of the so-called rhymes to the eye—words ending, but not pronounced alike—but when there is no similarity of sound at all, we emphatically demur. Here are some, taken at random, of the numberless false rhymes which disfigure these poems: "Hills—swells;" "height—infinite;" "best—least" (these last two in one short piece of sixteen lines); "buds—multitudes;" "repose—coos;" "flower—more;" "pierce—universe," etc. Now such as these are utterly indefensible. The different sounds of the same vowel are as different among themselves as from any other sounds, and there is no sense in taking advantage of the accident that they are represented by the same letter to cheat the ear and plead the poverty of the alphabet. In a man who labored for words, we could condone a roughness here and there; but in a writer of De Vere's fluency there is no excuse for such gross carelessness.
We observe also at intervals a kind of baldness of expression—a ruggedness and disregard of beauty in uttering ideas—that is unpleasant. We think, with a learned friend who first drew our attention to it, that this comes of the authors anxiety and determination to be clear. The lines seem like men trained down to fighting-weight—all strength and no contour. No doubt the high and difficult ideas to be rendered (for it is never seen in the descriptive interludes) constitute ample cause for this fault; but yet, in noticing the whole, we are constrained to note it as a blemish.
It remains to speak of the author's poems on Ireland. Here it is evident that he feels warmly as the chief organizer himself; and yet nothing can be further from to-day's Fenianism than the tone of his writings. Irish they are to the core—as animated as the best in proclaiming the wrongs of Ireland and the misrule of the invaders—but from the same premises somehow he seems to draw a different conclusion. This is to our author one of those near and dear subjects which are elements in a man's inner life: he has published another volume [Footnote 21] upon it, and a large portion of his poems turn on it. Most of the best among his single poems—The Irish Celt to the Irish Norman, the Ode to Ireland, the beautiful Year of Sorrow, and others—are either too long or too close-woven for quotation. Another able one is The Sisters, which is full of beautiful thoughts, independent of the Irish bearing.
[Footnote 21: English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. London, 1848.]
But the most prominent and elaborate of these poems is Inisfail, or Ireland in the Olden Time—a chronological series of odes, songs, and all manner of remarks in rhyme, illustrative of Ireland's history and the feeling of her people, through the various epochs of her national and denationalized life. There is more historical research, more talent, and more time buried to waste in this poem, than would make ten ordinary shallow reputations. The author shows a thorough and avitalizedknowledge of Irish history, and he penetrates well and nobly the{84}succession of popular sentiment; nay, he has done a more difficult thing still—he has caught much of the spirit of bardic verse. Only our very decided and deliberate opinion is, that the spirit of bardic verse is extremely like the gorilla—very hard to catch, and not particularly beautiful when caught. We have read, we are fairly sure, the better part of the English-Irish poetry that has attained any note—that class of which Clarence Mangan stands at the head, and are very much grieved and dissatisfied with it. Wherever the Gaelic ode-form is adopted, or the Gaelic symbolism—the Roisin Dhu, Silk of the Kine, etc.—we cannot help wishing it absent. Whatever has pleased us in poems of this sort would have pleased as well or better in another guise; whatever has fatigued or offended, has generally done so on account of its Gaelic form. From weary experience, we have reached the firm conclusion that the Gaelic style is peculiarly adapted to the Erse tongue, and we earnestly hope that future twangings of the harp that hung in Tara's halls may be either in the aforesaid dialect, or else, like Moore's Irish Melodies (and does any one wish for anything more nobly Irish?), consonant in style with the spirit of the language they are written in. The best talent devoted to grafting Gaelic blossoms on English stems has only served to show them essentially uncongenial. Every attempt of this kind reads like a translation from Erse into English, and, like all translations, hints in every turn of the superiority of the original. And, speaking disinterestedly (we are, as it happens, neither Gael nor Sassenach), we scarcely think any translator likely to swim in waters where Clarence Mangan barely floated.
Thus we admire much of Inisfail for the wonderful adaptiveness which revivifies for us the dead feelings of dead generations, while at the same time we cannot thoroughly like nor enjoy it. There is great artistic taste throughout, but the poetical merit, as indeed might be expected, Appears to us to be greatest in the delineations from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century—neither too far nor too near in point of time. The outlawry times elicit some fine lines: in fact, violation of law seems always to bring our author out at his best. Of the earlier poems, perhaps the best are The Malison and The Faithful Norman. These are of the first, or pure Irish period. The next, or Irish-Norman epoch, is full of the best and the worst of our author's verse. Of The Bard Ethell we have spoken before. The Bier that Conquered is a striking poem, as are also the quaint, rambling, suggestive lines called The Wedding of the Clans. Amid several long, fierce, and highly Gaelic exultations over battles, chiefs, and things in general, we find a noble poem. The Bishop of Ross, which we really regret we cannot quote here. Just before it, however, is one of the best which we may have space for:
KING CHARLES'S "GRACES."A.D. 1626"Thus babble the strong ones, 'The chain is slackened!Ye can turn half round on your sides to sleep!With the thunderbolt still your isle is blackened,But it hurls no bolt upon tower or steep.We are slaves in name! Old laws proscribed you;But the king is kindly, the Queen is fair.They are knaves or fools who would goad or bribe youA legal freedom to claim. Beware!'II."We answer and thus: Our country's honorTo us is dear as our country's life!That stigma the bad law casts upon herIs the brand on the fame of a blameless wifeOnce more we answer: From honor neverCan safety long time be found apart;The bondsman that vows not his bond to sever,Is a slave by right, and a slave in heart!"
There is the true ring about this—strength and spirit both. Close by it is another—the only one of the odes we like—The Suppression of the Faith in Ulster, which is of the same calibre.
The last book (there are three) is full of beauty as the style grows modern. But we have cited so much that is beautiful, that we prefer quoting one of the few but forcible instances where our most Christian poet gives vent to his very considerable powers of sarcasm:
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GOOD-HEARTED."The young lord betrayed an orphan maid—The young lord soft-natured and easy:The man was 'good-hearted,' the neighbors said;Flung meat to his dogs; to the poor flung bread.His father stood laughing when Drogheda bled;He hated a conscience queasy!II."A widow met him, dark trees o'erhead,Her child and the man just parted—When home she walked her knife it was red;Swiftly she walked, and muttered, and said,'The blood rushed fast from a fount full-fed!Ay, the young lord was right "good-hearted!"'III."When morning wan its first beam shed.It fell on a corpse yet wanner;The great-hearted dogs the young lord had fedWatched, one at the feet and one at the head—But their months with a blood-pool hard by were red;They loved—in the young lord's manner."
There is something about the fierce bitterness here that strongly reminds one of Tennyson's poem of The Sisters, with its weird line—
"Oh! the Earl was fair to see!"
From several of very nearly the same purport, we select the following, influenced to choose it, as we own, by the wonderful flow of its measure, as well as its truly Irish beauty. There is a kind of peculiar richness of diction that no other nation on earth ever attains. Every reader of Tom Moore will know what we mean, and recognize a kindred spirit in
SEMPER RADEM"The moon, freshly risen from the bosom of ocean,Hangs o'er it suspended, all mournful yet bright;And a yellow sea-circle with yearning emotionSwells up as to meet it,and clings to its light.The orb, unabiding, grows whiter, mounts higher;The pathos of darkness descends on the brine—O Erin! the North drew its light from thy pyre;Thy light woke the nations; the embers were thine.II."'Tis sunrise! The mountains flash forth, and, new-reddened,The billows grow lustrous so lately forlorn;From the orient with vapors long darkened and deadened.The trumpets of Godhead are pealing the morn:He rises, the sun, in his might reascending;Like an altar beneath him lies blazing the sea!O Erin! who proved thee returns to thee, blendingThe future and past in one garland for thee!"
But what we regard as really the finest poem in Inisfail is an apparent, perhaps a real, exception to our rule above stated, that whatever of this poetry pleases us would please as well if divested of its Gaelic form. The charm of this lies in its being so essentially Irish in conception. It is just such an original, bold, wild inspiration as no other body than an Irish clan could without incongruity be made to feel. There is more intenseIrishness(what other word will express it?) in it than in all the poems—ay, and half the poets—of this century. We give it with the author's own explanation prefixed:
THE PHANTOM FUNERAL."James Fitz-Garret, son of the great Earl of Desmond, had been sent to England, when a child, as a hostage, and was for seventeen years kept a prisoner in the Tower, and educated in the Queen's religion. James Fitz-Thomas, the 'Sugane Earl,' having meantime assumed the title and prerogatives of Earl of Desmond, the Queen sent her captive to Ireland, attended by persons devoted to her, and provided with aconditionalpatent for his restoration .... As the young earl walked to church, it was with difficulty that a guard of English soldiers could keep a path open for him. From street and window and housetop every voice urged him to fidelity to his ancestral faith. The youth, who did not even understand the language in which he was adjured, went on to the Queen's church, as it was called; and with loud cries his clan rushed away and abandoned his standard for ever. Shortly afterward he returned to England, where, within a few months, he died.
Strew the bed and strew the bier(Who rests upon it was never man)With all that a little child holds dear,With violets blue and violets wan.Strew the bed and strew the bierWith the berries that redden thy shores, Corann;His lip was the berry, his skin was clearAs the waxen blossom—he ne'er was man.Far off he sleeps, yet we mourn him here;Their tale was a falsehood; he ne'er was man!'Tis a phantom funeral! Strew the bierWith white lilies brushed by the floating swan.They lie who say that the false queen caught himA child asleep on the mountains wide;A captive reared him, a strange faith taught him;—'Twas for no strange faith that his father died!They lie who say that the child returnedA man unmanned to his towers of pride;That his people with curses the false Earl spurned:Woe, woe, Kilmallock! they lie, and lied!The clan was wroth at an ill report.But now the thunder-cloud melts in tears.The child that was motherless played. "'Twas sport."A child must sport in his childish years!Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!The women of Desmond loved well that child!Our lamb was lost in the winter snow;Long years we sought him in wood and wild.How many a babe of Fitzgerald's bloodIn hut was fostered though born in hall!The old stock burgeoned the fair new bud,The old land welcomed them, each and all!
{86}
Glynn weeps to-day by the Shannon's tide,And Shanid and she that frowns o'er Deal;There is woe by the Laune and the Carra's side,And where the knight dwells by the woody Feale.In Dingle and Beara they chant his dirge:Far off he faded—our child—sing low!We have made him a bed by the ocean's surge,We have made him a bier on the mountain's brow.The clan was bereft! the old walls they left;With cries they rushed to the mountains drear.But now great sorrow their heart has cleft;—See, one by one they are drawing near!Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!The flakes fall fast on the little bier;—The yew-branch and eagle-plume over them throw!The last of the Desmond chiefs lies here."
We close, far from completing our sketch of the poet. We have not exhausted the volumes before us, and they do not exhaust their author. De Vere has written several other books, mostly of early date—from 1843 to 1850—which one must read to know him entirely. But we are very sure that those who will read the books from which we have drawn our illustrations will read all. There are few authors who grow so upon the reader. Somehow the force and beauty of the thoughts do not impress at first. We think the rationale of the process is that we mostly begin by reading three parts of sound to one of sense. After the melody comes the harmony; gradually, on after-reading, the glitter of the words ceases to dazzle, and then, if ever, we commune mind to mind with the author. This is as rare with modern readers as a hand-to hand bayonet fight in modern battles. Now Aubrey de Vere writes a great deal of thought so very quietly, that we miss the cackling which even talent nowadays is apt to indulge in on laying any supposed golden eggs of wisdom. Hence we have some singular opinions about him. One finds him cold and impassible; another votes him a sort of gentlemanly Fenian visionary, while a third devotes a column of one of our best hypercritical periodicals to viewing him as a mere love-poet. These are all windfall opinions, which had been better ripening on the tree. The grace, the rhythm, and, above all, the stern ascendency of truthful exactness over inaccurate felicities of expression, strike one constantly more and more. We have ourselves passed through these phases of opinion, besides several others; but every day fortifies our final conviction. It is, that Aubrey de Vere is one of those true poets whom the few love well; who will always have admirers, never popularity; and who must wait for his full fame until that distant but coming day when blind, deep movements of unity shall thrill the sects of Christendom, and bigotry no longer veil from the gifted and appreciative the merits of the first Catholic poet of to-day.
{87}
Up to the time when James Ball entered the witness-box, the whole case had been dead against the prisoner. Even the grave doubts which the cross-examination raised about the housekeeper's veracity had passed unsubstantiated by any further evidence or proof; and the cook's story of the footstep on the stairs died out of all reckoning in the modicum of balance left in favor of the accused man when Davis, the chemist, had closed his evidence. But when his luckless assistant got down, after making such astounding admissions, we breathed again, and hopes that had been trampled under foot rose once more with renewed buoyancy. The rigid face of Serjeant Donaldson relaxed into anxious gravity, and the frank, genial countenance of Mr. Forster—Hugh Atherton's contemporary, and at whose side he had fought many a legal battle—shook off its cloud as he sat down and conferred with his senior colleague; whilst I heard a deep sigh of relief burst from Merrivale as he uttered, "Thank God, we have got overthatrock!"
Then Donaldson rose. I think I hear and see him still, that grey-headed serjeant, with his rugged Scotch features lighted up by all the earnestness of his will, all the acute intelligence of his mind, as he turned to the jury, and in a voice tremulous with emotion, though it failed not to set forth the firmness of his purpose, and the honest conviction of his soul, opened his defence of Hugh Atherton.
"Though standing at this bar," said Serjeant Donaldson, "with a heavy cloud of accusation overshadowing his hitherto stainless name, though branded by public opinion with the foul epithet of murderer, I can still call Mr. Atherton 'my friend' without a flush of shame; I can yet take him by the hand and feel proud to hail him brother by profession, companion in the same vocation. If," said the Serjeant, raising his voice and looking boldly around him, "the last witness had never been placed before you and made the remarkable revelation which you have all heard, I would still indorse what I have just said, and assert to you, my lords and gentlemen of the jury, my deep and heartfelt conviction of the innocence of the prisoner. But I have other and better grounds upon which to plead before you to-day—the only grounds upon which you can legally and conscientiously find a verdict."
He then proceeded to review the evidence, pulling it to pieces, and cutting right and left into every deposition, showing up the flaws, attackingsans ménagementthe character and veracity of the witnesses, dealing blows with no gentle hand on every side, and evidently lashing "his learned friend the Solicitor-General" into a state of suppressed fury; the whole drift and gist of his argument going to prove that, unless the fact of the prisoner's visit to the chemist's shop in Vero street did, to the minds of the jury, involve as a necessary consequence his purchasing the paper of strychnine, that also being satisfactorily established by conclusive{88}evidence, no verdict against the prisoner could be found. On the other hand, the last witness has positively declared that the strychnine had been purchased under false pretences by a female, and that on the following day hush-money had been sent to and received by James Ball not to identify that woman who bought the poison. Further, he should presently call a witness who would corroborate all that had been disclosed by James Ball—one whom he, Ball, had evidently considered as effectually silenced; one who, though but a boy, had given a very steady, consistent, and lucid account of what had transpired on the evening of the 23d and on the following day. After commenting further upon this, and touching pointedly upon the curious coincidence of my rencontre with the woman in Vere street and the visit of the woman to the chemist's shop, he wound up his address: "There has been question today, gentlemen, of one whose name should never have been dragged before your notice, but who, in her agonized wish of doing her feeble part in clearinghim, her betrothed husband, from the foul charge laid on him, has besought us, who are engaged in his defence, not to spare her, not to deprive her of taking her share in the testimony we shall bring forward in his favor. Gentlemen, this noble-minded girl. Miss Ada Leslie, will tell you in what terms the prisoner at the bar used to speak of his deceased uncle—the only guardian and father whom he ever remembers—in that intimate communion which exists between a man and the woman whom he is going to make part of himself. I need add no more. Providence has shaken from under your feet the only ground upon which you could condemn Mr. Atherton; Providence has, to my mind, pointed out the road along which further inquiries into this most heinous and wicked murder can be pursued. The same almighty and just God will enlighten your understandings and bring your minds to a righteous conclusion upon the case before you. But, gentlemen, although as I said at first starting, we have better grounds than those of private conviction upon which to urge the prisoner's innocence—viz., those of proof and evidence—still I cannot but think you all feel with me that, as you look at him standing there, as you remember the tones of his voice, so familiar to us in this court, urging upon us the arguments of a powerful mind, thoroughly healthy in its moral tone, and the pleadings dictated by a heart whose impulses were intrinsically generous and humane, whose guileless soul—and I crave his pardon for uttering these words in his presence—shone out of his honest eyes, and whose blameless life was openly known to all and clear as the noonday—I think, if the evidence had been other than it was, or than that which you are going to hear will be, you would still be ready to exclaim, 'That mancannotbe guilty of the crime imputed to him;whois innocent ifheis proved guilty?"
I had no idea that Ada would be in court, far less give evidence; and I concluded she had not mentioned it to me lest I should object or be distresses on her account. The sensation was tremendous in court when she entered the witness-box, accompanied by her mother. The latter's agitation whether affected or real, seemed very great, and the frequent application of her handkerchief to her eyes betrayed she was crying. How Ada had got her there at all was a wonder; how she remained silentwhenthere, was a greater marvel. Can I ever forget her as she stood there, that tall slender girl, with her pale colorless face of calm and high resolve, the dark shadows beneath those eyes that looked as if now they never slept, but with the steadfast light of deep, devoted affection shining in them as they fell upon Hugh; her whole figure quivering with emotion, and her clasped hands leaning upon the table before her? One look at Hugh, and then she returned to the Lord Chief-Justice. I saw the{89}undisguised rush of sympathy and of interest flash across his countenance as his gaze met hers; and he leaned towards her with the courteous attention of the innate gentleman that he was.
"My lord," she began, in tones that at first were scarcely audible, though peculiarly sweet, but which rose and deepened as she went on, "I have come here because there is something I wish to say to you, although I know you thinkheis innocent; but still I had best say it. For many months past I have known every thought of his heart; there has been no secret kept back from me. My lord, he loved that poor murdered man very tenderly, even as he would have loved his father had he lived, and he never spoke of him but with kindness and affection. It was only on the very day it happened that he was talking with me of the future. We were to have been man and wife—oh, I trust in God we shall still be!—and that day he, my Hugh, said how he was looking forward to the time when we should have a home of our own, and he could win his uncle away sometimes from his solitary life, and make him come to us. Do you think," she said, turning with passionate suddenness to the jury,—"do you think he could say that tomeand an hour afterwards kill the old man? do you think that of him who never bore an unkindly thought even to a dumb animal?"
And then her womanly timidity seemed to come back, or physical excitement overpower her; and when Mr. Frost, a young and rather conceited-looking man, rose with a view doubtless to cross-question her, the Solicitor-General waved him back, for she had sunk on the chair placed for her.
Then I heard, and hearing it my heart seemed like to break, a heavy groan burst from the prisoner's lips—the first sign of deep emotion that had escaped him during those long weary hours of suffering and suspense; and I law him stretch out his arms toward her with a wild movement of unutterable love. Thank God, she neither saw nor heard! Merrivale hastened to her, and with her mother led her out of the court.
Jacob Mullins was then called by Serjeant Donaldson.
He said: "I am sixteen years of age, and have lived two years with Mr. Davis, chemist in Vere street, as errand-boy. I take the medicines home when made up, and make myself generally useful in the shop. I never serve over the counter. I clean the pestles, mortars, and all vessels used, but I never serve out medicines. I quite well remember the evening of the 23d. I was sitting at the far end of the shop behind the counter, polishing a brass mortar. I could see who came into the shop, because where I sat was opposite the flap of the counter, and I looked through each time any one came in. I wasn't very busy that evening. I remember a tall gentleman coming in and asking for some spirits of camphor. Master served him; Mr. Ball was in the shop. I suppose it was about eight o'clock or thereabouts. I never take much count of time, except when I have to hurry. He didn't buy anything else. I am quite sure of it; I could swear it. I was listening all the time. He was a very tall gentleman. I think it was the prisoner at the bar; he was like him, but he had his hat on."
Baron Watson: "Let the prisoner put on a hat."
Witness: "Yes, that is the gentleman. I could swear it is the same."
Serjeant Donaldson: "What happened next?"
Witness: "A few minutes after the gentleman went out, a lady came in. I did not see her face. She had on a thick veil. She asked for a grain of strychnine. My master was out of the shop. Mr. Ball said to her, 'That's poison; I daren't give it you.' 'Oh,' says she, 'it's all right. It's for my husband to try on a dog. He's a doctor.' 'A doctor!' says Mr. Ball; 'where does he live?'{90}'Just round the corner—Mr. Grainger, at the top of Vere street 'All right,' says, Mr. Ball; and goes to the drawer where the poisons are kept, and unlocks it, and I see him weigh it out and put it up.' 'How much?' say a she; 'A shilling,' says he; 'and I shall come round presently and see if it's all right.' 'Very well,' says she; 'come now if you like.' 'No, by-and-by,' says Mr. Ball, 'when the master's back.' On that she went out. I couldn't swear to her, nor to what she wore. I never notices ladies' togs. She had a veil on—that's all I know. I went home soon after nine that evening. Mr. Ball sleeps in the house. The next day we heard that old Mr. Thorneley of Wimpole street had been poisoned by strychnine; and then, that the poison had been bought at our shop. Everybody was talking of it who came in. I went up to Mr. Ball when we were alone in the shop at dinner-time, and says I, 'It's along of that strychnine that was bought last night here. I guess, as the murder's been done.' 'Hold your confounded tongue.' says he, 'or we shall get into a precious mess.' He jaws awful at me sometimes, and I'm afraid of him; so I said no more and kept aloof from him, for he looked terrible black all the afternoon. At five o'clock the postman brought in a letter for Mr. Ball. He was in the parlor having his tea. I called out there was a letter for him, and he came into the shop. I saw him open the letter and take out a banknote. 'My eyes!' says I, 'you're in luck to-day, Mr. Ball.' He was reading the letter. With that, he turned on me as fierce and red as a turkey-cock. 'You young viper,' says he, 'if you go blabbing about my affairs I'll get you discharged as sure as I am standing here!' I thought he'd have killed me. Why haven't I told this before? Because nobody's asked, and because I have been frightened of him. He's given me money several times lately, and mother's been ill, and—" (Here the witness broke down and began to cry.) It was no use the gentleman (the Solicitor-General, who was cross-questioning him) trying to bully him. He'd told the truth; it was true as gospel. He'd take his oath any day. He could and did swear to it all. Nobody had given him a farthing except Mr. Ball. He'd only told this to a gentleman a few days back who had spoken to him and then served a paper on him to appear to-day. The gentleman had told him afterwards he was a detective officer.
This was the pith of what Jacob Mullins deposed. In vain did the Solicitor-General try to badger and browbeat him; he stuck like a limpet to the same story. Confronted with James Ball, only the same results produced. Serjeant Donaldson, at Merrivale's whispered instigation, tried to bring out of them both a clearer identification of the person who had bought the strychnine, but in vain. Only Mullins, in reply to a query as to whether she spoke like a foreigner, said he couldn't just exactly tell, but she seem to talk rather funny. Confronted at the prisoner's request with Mrs. Haag, became confused, and said he didn't think it was the lady; it might be and it mightn't; was sure he never could point her out for certain. But although the person who did buy the strychnine had not been identified, the fact that Hugh Atherton did not buy it was satisfactorily proved, and that was matter for the deepest thankfulness.
The two detective officers Keene and Jones were next examined. To what is already known the following was added: Ten years ago a man of the name of Bradley had been convicted at the Old Bailey of burglary at Mr. Thorneley's house in the City, and sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude. Inspector Keene had been employed in the case, and had been helped principally by anonymous letters, giving information which had led to the detection of the burglar. Bradley on being captured had hinted that he knew to whom he was indebted for{91}his apprehension. Thinking to ferret out some accomplice, Inspector Keene had shown him one of the anonymous communications received, and he had immediately identified the handwriting as his wife's. He then confided to Inspector Keene that she was a foreigner, a Belgian by birth; that he had married her at Plymouth, and separated from her two years after; that she was in domestic service—but where and in what capacity he would not divulge. Either fear of or affection for her seemed to be greatly influencing his mind. This same Bradley had made his escape from the penal settlement in Australia during the spring of the present year, and had been seen and recognized by Detective Jones in a small public-house in Blue-Anchor Lane, known as one of the worst haunts of bad characters in the metropolis. But unable with safety to take him into custody on the night in question, the police had lost sight of him since, up to the present time. Putting two and two together, Inspector Keene had last week travelled down to Plymouth, searched the parochial registers, found and obtained the certified copy of marriage between Robert Bradley and Maria Haag which Serjeant Donaldson had handed in to their lordships. Further, Detective Jones stated, as a corroboration of what I had already related in my evidence, that this Bradley, or O'Brian, as he now called himself, was in close communication with a man of the name of De Vos,aliasSullivan, who again was in communication with Mr. Lister Wilmot; this same De Vos, or Sullivan, having formerly been in prison for embezzlement, and was now under suspicion of uttering false coin. The full relation of the conversation between De Vos and O'Brian on the night of our visit to "Noah's Ark" was not without its effect upon judges and jury.
Both the Chief-Justice and Baron Watson put repeated questions to Jones; and the Solicitor-General quite surpassed himself in his endeavors to browbeat both him and Inspector Keene. All to no purpose. Nor could that learned gentleman in his final address, after the case for the defence was closed, at that supreme moment which English law gives to the prosecutor to the crushing of all hopes raised by the evidence and appeal of the prisoner—not then could he remove the impression made on all minds that a mystery hitherto unpenetrated lay beneath the last evidence adduced.
The Lord Chief-Justice summed up. He said that, to convict a man of murder by poison, evidence must be adduced to prove that the poison was administered by the person accused; that the points of the case before them were these: The murdered gentleman, Mr. Thorneley, had on the evening of the 23d of October last received a visit from his two nephews, Mr. Lister Wilmot, and Mr. Philip Hugh Atherton, the prisoner at the bar; that a dispute had occurred between the three, relative to advancing money by the deceased to Mr. Wilmot; that the brunt of Mr. Thorneley's anger had fallen, strange to say, and from some unknown cause, upon the prisoner; that the prisoner had retaliated, and used words of threatening import, implying that the deceased would repent on the morrow what he had said that night; that at nine o'clock the housekeeper brought in the usual refreshment of which Mr. Thorneley partook at that hour—bitter ale and hard biscuits. The prisoner at the bar went to the table, poured out the ale into a glass, and handed it to his uncle. Soon after the nephews, one after the other, took leave of him and went away. Mr. Thorneley retired to rest that night about ten o'clock, without having any further communication with his household. In the morning he was found dead in his bed. On medical evidence he is proved to have been poisoned by strychnine, and strychnine is found in the few drops of bitter ale left in the tumbler out of which the deceased had drunk on the{92}previous evening. In the ale remaining in the bottle no strychnine is found. Now here arises a question and a doubt. Was there, or was there not, any ale poured out in the glass before it was brought up into Mr. Thorneley's study? The prisoner in his statement before the magistrates, and before the coroner, distinctly says there was; the housekeeper swears there was not. Is the housekeeper's evidence to be relied on? Much had been adduced that day which tended to show that at least it was doubtful. The Chief-Justice commented at length upon the evidence of the two detectives, and then said:
"The suspicions, however, of the police were directed to Mr. Hugh Atherton; and the evidence had shown that he was met coming out of a chemist's shop in Vere street on the evening of the murder, and before visiting his uncle; that upon being taken into custody the next day, an empty paper, labelled Strychnine, and bearing the name of Davis, chemist, Vere street, was found in the pocket of the overcoat which he had worn on his visit to Wimpole street. On the other hand, both James Ball, the chemist's assistant, and Jacob Mullins, the errand-boy, had sworn that the grain of strychnine entered as sold on the 23d was purchased by a female on false pretenses. Both likewise swore that the prisoner did not purchase any strychnine, but only the bottle of camphorated spirits found on his table. Then, again, James Ball had owned to receiving a letter containing hush-money, and a caution not to identify the person who had bought the poison. How, then, did the paper labelled 'strychnine' get into the prisoner's pocket? He declares he knows nothing of it; and on that point there is no further evidence. There was another mystery also which in his, the judge's, mind bore very direct influence upon the case in question; and that was the assertion of Mr. John Kavanagh that he had made and executed a will for the deceased gentleman on the night of his death, leaving the bulk of his property to a hitherto unknown and unrecognized son, which son and heir had been found under peculiar and difficult circumstances—a living confirmation of the truth of Mr. Kavanagh's statement. The question of this will was not for the present jury to consider; but simply they were to bear in mind the circumstances under which it was made, the disclosures attendant, and, above all, the fact that whereas this last will, conferring a handsome income on the prisoner at the bar, remained a buried secret from everybody, the prisoner included, save the lawyer who made it under solemn promise of silence, the other will, bequeathing a mere nominal sum to the prisoner, and cutting off with a shilling the rightful heir, namely, Mr. Thorneley's son, was lodged with the deceased's family lawyers, produced, read, and acted upon by them and the sole residuary legatee, Mr. Wilmot. This was to be considered vis-à-vis with the motive by which the prisoner at the bar was implied to have been influenced to the commission of the crime charged against him." The Chief-Justice concluded, after many more comments, by saying that, although every one must have been touched by the appearance and words of the first witness heard in the defence, yet that, as far as evidence went, they must not be allowed to weigh with any value. The one great question, deduced from all that had gone before, which the jury had to consider was, whether the prisoner at the bar had or had not purchased the strychnine in question, had or had not introduced it into the glass of bitter ale handed by him to the deceased, Mr. Thorneley. And he prayed the God of light, and truth, and justice to enlighten their minds and guide them to a right conclusion.
I have but faintly portrayed the clear, lucid manner in which that able judge summed up the evidence, or the deep feeling expressed in every tone of his voice. Cautious and prudent{93}to a degree as he had been in his language, it yet gleamed out from time to time, like a ray of sunshine, that in his own mind he considered Athertonnotguilty. The jury after five minutes' deliberation asked to retire.
Do you know what that suspense is,—that hanging on each minute which might bring the issues of life or death? Can you thank what it was to stand there for that hour and a quarter, seventy-five minutes, forty-five hundred seconds, when every minute seemed an hour, and every second a minute; with the dead silence reigning in the court, broken only by casual sounds now and then, that were hushed almost instantly, to so great a pitch had the interest and suspense of the whole crowd collected there risen; your eyes fixed upon that fatal door through which you knew the decision would be borne, with your heart throbbing in dull, heavy thumps against your breast, and your breath almost bushed and dying on your lips? So we stood that evening, the dense November fog stealing into the court, and the gas-lamps flaring garish and yellow in the thick atmosphere, waiting for the verdict. Twice over was a message sent in from the jury-room to the judges, demanding further explanation or elucidation on some point or other. And still we waited. At last the door opened, and they filed back one by one into their box, and took their seats in solemn silence, and were instantly harangued by the clerk of the court, and called upon to declare whether Philip Hugh Atherton was guilty or innocent of wilful murder. Amidst a dead hush, a stillness that was thrilling in its intensity, the foreman stood up and pronounced the verdict, "NOT GUILTY." I saw the prisoner raise his hands for one moment, and then his head drooped on his breast, and he leaned heavily against the railing in front of him. I saw Merrivale rise hastily, and, turning round, lay his hand upon Hugh's shoulder, and his counsel eagerly stretching out their bands towards him in fervent congratulation; and then was heard the Chief-Justice's voice addressing the foreman of the jury:
"The peculiarities and complexity of the case make it needful that we should ask upon what grounds you have given in your verdict."
Foreman: "We find the prisoner not guilty, my lord, on the ground that it is proved he did not buy the strychnine, and that the evidence of the housekeeper is unreliable evidence. But we think that until the mystery of the murder is cleared up, suspicion must still attach itself to Mr. Atherton."
The Chief-Justice to the prisoner: "It is usual to say whether we, before whom a case has been tried, agree in the verdict of the jury. Both myself and my brother Watson do most fully in this instance. We agree that upon the evidence brought forward to-day you could not by the criminal law be convicted; but we also agree in the remark made by the foreman that a degree of suspicion and doubt will rest upon you so long as the real perpetrator of this horrible crime is not forthcoming. As having known you under happier circumstances, I sincerely trust and pray for your sake that time may bring to light this hidden deed of darkness."
The judges rose and left the court. Then arose from all parts a savage yell of disappointment. Once before I told how thirsty the public were for another sight of the hangman and his victim; and now to snatch their prey from under their very eyes, with the stain of crime upon him, with a shadow of the gallows hanging over him, was more than they could bear. Amidst groans and hisses, amidst a deluge of the foulest epithets, he passed out of the court—UNCONVICTED. Unconvicted, but not unsuspected; uncondemned, but not unblemished. With the taint of murder clinging to him, with his fair good name tarnished by the withering breath of imputed crime, and his innocent life robbed of its{94}noblest beauty in the eyes of his fellow-men, Philip Hugh Atherton left that criminal court and became once more a free, and yet a marked man beneath his native sky. His whole position opened out clear before me in that one brief second which succeeded the closing the trial—all its future suffering and sorrow. Oh! if he would but now realize that at least one friend was true to him, that one heart warmed to him with the same affection as ever, who would devote himself to clearing away every cloud that dimmed his future! And dashing away the blinding tears that would force themselves into my eyes, I made my difficult way through the crowd and gained the outer court. A carriage stood opposite the private door, and a double line of policemen guarded a passage to it. I hurried forward. Hugh Atherton and Lister Wilmot passed quickly out, the carriage-door shut, and they drove off.
"Atherton and Wilmot!" I was saying the names aloud to myself, when I heard a mocking laugh. Standing beside me, and looking up into my face, was Mrs. Haag.
"Have you been drinking again, Mr. Kavanagh?" she said in her peculiar hard tones, and was gone in a moment. But she left what she little dreamed of leaving behind her—the indelible impression on my mind of her strong resemblance to Lister Wilmot.