‘Yea, truly, as the sallowing yearsFall from us faster, like frost-loosened leavesPushed by the misty touch of shortening days,And that unwakened winter nears,’Tis the void chair our surest guest receives,’Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,’Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;We count our rosary by the beads we miss.’[595]
‘Yea, truly, as the sallowing yearsFall from us faster, like frost-loosened leavesPushed by the misty touch of shortening days,And that unwakened winter nears,’Tis the void chair our surest guest receives,’Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,’Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;We count our rosary by the beads we miss.’[595]
“How long and how full the hours of watching by a death-bed seem! how full of what varied emotions and anxieties, an almost agonising eagerness to do the right thing every minute even in a physical sense, butmuch more tosaythe right thing, only the right thing, to one who is on the awful threshold of so great a transition, to whom, because she is on the very brink of unravelling the great mystery, all the commonplaces, even of religion, must fall so flat. One can only try to help, tosupportthe beloved one, who is passing away from our possibilities, spiritually as well as physically, try to recollect what would be a comfort to oneself in such a crisis, and let oneself gowiththe departing one to the very portal itself.
“With dear Kate I had often spoken of this, yet, when the reality came, it was unlike all we had imagined, and I suppose it is always so. But I felt how well it must always be to talk over the end of life with those you are likely to be near when the close really comes. It makes a sort of death-bed comradeship, if I can so call it, which could never exist without it, and certainly in this case it made Kate cling to my being constantly with her, when she would allow no one else to see her. Then how seldomanywords are possible from a dying person. In the six death-beds I have attended it has been so; and even in this case, when it lasted four days and nights, there was little speech, only an urgency that I should never leave her, that I should keep near her, that I should be close by her side as long as she was on earth at all, till she passed into the unseen.
“Whilst feeling the change which her loss makes in my life, I have read words of Bishop Magee which have come home to me. ‘The most beautiful and natural of sunsets is still a sunset, and the shadows that follow it are chill and depressing. I begin to feelthe peculiar sadness that the death of much older relatives brings to those who are entering themselves on old age. When I see all those whom I remember once, middle-aged men and women, younger by many years than I am now, all passed and gone, I feel somehow as if light was going out of life very fast. There are so few living with whom one can recall thepast, and grow young again in recalling it.’”
Journal.
“Holmhurst, Sept. 31.—I have been a week at Swaylands to meet the Duchess of York, and as there were scarcely any other guests, saw a great deal of her, and was increasingly filled with admiration for the dignified simplicity and single-mindedness, and the high sense of duty by which her naturally merry, genial nature is pervaded, and which will be the very salvation of England some day. Before her scandal sits dumb: she has a quiet but inflexible power of silencing everything which seems likely to approach ill-natured gossip, yet immediately after gives such a genial kindly look and word to the silenced one as prevents any feeling of mortification. All morning the Duchess was occupied with her lady in real hard work, chiefly letters, I believe; in the afternoons we went for long drives and sight-seeings—of Penshurst, Knole, Groombridge, Hever, Ightham, and she was full of interest in the history and associations of these old-world places. At Hever the owners were away, but we got a table from a cottage, and an excellent tea-meal was spread upon it at the top of the high fieldabove the castle. If the Duchess is ever Queen of England, that table will be considered to have a history.”
“Holmhurst, Sept. 8.—I have been in Suffolk on an ancestor-hunt, which involved a delightful visit to Herbert and Lady Mary Ewart at Great Thurlow. It was in the time of George I., I think, that our great-great-uncle Francis Naylor, the owner of Hurstmonceaux Castle, a ‘Medmenham Brother’ and the wildest of the wild, was led to a changed and better life by his love for the beautiful Carlotta Alston of Edwardstone. Unfortunately, whilst they were engaged, his father, Bishop Hare, found out that her elder sister, Mary Margaret, was one of the greatest heiresses in England, married her without telling his son till the day before the wedding, and then positively forbade him to become his brother-in-law. Francis Naylor was very much inclined to go to the devil again, but Carlotta maintained her influence, and eventually they were married without the Bishop’s consent. They were too poor to live at Hurstmonceaux, but the third Miss Alston had married the rich Stephen Soame, and she gave them a home, and there, in the house of the generous Anne Soame, they lived and died. The old Jacobean mansion of Little Thurlow was magnificent and had eighty-one bedrooms; its beautiful wrought-iron gates with pilasters were given by Charles II., who often stayed there, and the family lived at Little Thurlow in most unusual state, even for that time, driving out daily in three carriages-and-four. Sir Stephen Soame, the builder of the house, has a grand tomb in thechurch where Francis and Carlotta Naylor and Anne Soame are buried behind his stately carved pew, and there are a most picturesque grammar-school and almshouses erected by him. I remember some of the Soames coming to Hurstmonceaux—as cousins—in my childhood, but their direct line died out at last, and the place went to some very distant relations from Beverley, who pulled down the old hall, because ‘they could not live in a house where you could drive a coach-and-four up the great staircase.’ Old Mrs. Soame, however, of the second set, did not die till she was 104, and the last of her two daughters only in 1885. Yet the Misses Soame had never been to London: their travels were limited to being driven twice a year to Lowestoft in their large yellow chariot with post-horses. They always intended to try the railway by going from Haverhill to the next station and having their carriage to meet them there; but when the day came they shrank from the feat. They were ‘worth an income to the doctor, the chemist, and the fishmonger,’ and they left a fortune to the family of a man who had once proposed to one of them.”
“Holmhurst, Oct. 23.—Again I have been on an ancestor-hunt. I met Mrs. Lowther at the old haunted house of Lawford Hall near Manningtree, and our hostess, Mrs. Mouncey, sent us to Hadleigh, where Mary Margaret Alston’s grandfather, Charles Trumbull, was the very saintly Rector in the time of James II., and resigned his living for his ordination oath’s sake on the advent of William III. The Rectory, now known as the Deanery, is a glorious old house, with agrand brick gateway, priests’ hiding-holes, and curious pictures by Canaletto—an intimate friend and visitor of one of the rectors—let into its walls. It was the home of Rowland Taylor, the Marian martyr, who was dragged down the street of Hadleigh to his stake outside the town ‘cracking jokes all the way,’ and another vicar was Hugh Rose, when Archbishop Trench was the curate.
“Two days later I went to Edwardstone, a delightful old place near Sudbury, one of the many of which Bishop Hare’s wife was the heiress, and where numbers of her Alston ancestors are buried; and then I was two days at the familiar Campsea Ashe, where, as its beloved owner says, ‘If you do not know how to enjoy yourself, you must be made to.’ Mr. Astor was there, and told me that the origin of the American expression ‘a chestnut’ lay in the rivalries of the theatres in Chestnut Street and Walnut Street in New York. An expected star who came out in the Walnut Street Theatre could only do things which had already appeared in Chestnut Street, and when the young men saw them they said, ‘That’s a chestnut,’ and it passed into a proverb.
“Mr. Astor was very funny about a man who was always late for everything, and who one day, when he was expecting a party to stay with him, rushed home after all his guests had arrived. On the stairs he met a man, with whom, to make up for lost time, he shook hands most warmly, saying, ‘Oh, my dear fellow, I’m so glad to see you; do make yourself quite at home and enjoy yourself.’ It was a burglar, very much surprised at his cordial reception, forhe was carrying off all the valuables. He also said—
“‘You know Dr. N. and his wonderful tales. I heard him tell of going to shoot chamois. He had sighted one a long way off and fired. He said the chamois never moved, but put up one foot and scratched its ear. He fired again, and it put up the other foot and scratched the other ear. Then he fired again and killed it. When he came up to it, he found that each of the first shots had touched an ear. The chamois had only thought, “Oh, these damned fleas!”
“‘Then Dr. N. told of how he went after bears. A grisly came and he shot him: then another grisly came and he shot him: then a third grisly came.... “If you say you shothim” said a man present, “I’ll throw this bottle at your head.” “Well, the third grisly escaped,” calmly said Dr. N.’
“The last two days of my absence I spent with the Grant Duffs at Lexden Manor, where Sir Mountstuart was most agreeable and anecdotive, and whence Lady Grant Duff drove me to see the old gateway of Layer Marney, beautiful in its great decay.”
“London, Nov. 29.—Luncheon with the C.’s, who had dined last night with the Wilberforces. Canon Wilberforce told them of a missionary establishment in Africa, a most admirable mission, which had been most effective, had converted the whole neighbourhood, built church and schools, and done no end of good.
“Then, in some crisis or other, the mission was swept away and the place was long left desolate.
“After many years the missionaries returned, expecting to find everything destroyed. But, to their astonishment, they found the church-bell going and the buildings in perfect repair, all looking as before—only therewasa difference. They could not make out what it was.
“So they went to the chief and asked him about it. ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘thereisone little difference. You used to tell us that God was love and always watching over us for good, while the devil was always seeking to destroy us; so we felt it was the devil we had better propitiate, and it is the devil we have worshipped ever since you left, and—it has most completely answered.’”
“Dec. 22, 1899.—I am just at the end of a long retreat in a sort of private hospital, where I have been for the sake of the ‘Nauheim cure’ for an affection of the heart, from which I have now suffered for more than a year, and which was greatly increased by the anxieties and sorrows of last August. I am better since my ‘cure,’ but am seldom quite well now, and, as I read in a novel, ‘my dinner is always either a satisfying fact or a poignant memory,’ and generally the latter. The South African war news is casting a shadow over the closing year, and the death of Lady Salisbury has been a real sorrow—an ever-kind friend since my early boyhood. I went to the memorial service for her in the Chapel-Royal—a beautiful service, but a very sad one to many.”
ToMrs.andMiss Agnes Thornycroft(after a happy visit tothem at Torquay).
“Liskeard, May 7, 1900.—I will begin a history to my two kindest of hostesses from this dreary wind-stricken little town, which is as ugly as it can be, but with a large, clean, old-fashioned posting-inn. I got a little victoria to take me the 2½ miles to St. Cleer’s Well in the uplands, in a moorland village, approached by primrosy, stitchworty lanes. The well is a glorious subject for sketching, old grey stones tinged with golden lichen, a canopy of open Norman arches, and background of purple hill. It was so bitterly, snowily cold that I feared, as I sate down on my camp-stool, that sciatica would never allow me to rise from it; but Providence sent me a whole schoolful of children, boys and girls, about sixty of them, who pressed close round through the whole performance, so I just wore them like an eider-down, and was rather hot than otherwise. Returning, the evening was still so young that I took the carriage on to St Keyne’s Well, on the other side of Liskeard, but it was scarcely worth the visit.”
“Helston, May 8, 6P.M.—No farther than this, for when I arrived here at midday, I found there was no chance of getting on to the Lizard; the whole town was in too great a turmoil to attend to any individual, for it was Furry Day, a local floral festa from very early times, and all the gentlemen and ladies of the neighbourhood (the real ones!) were dancing in couples, with bands playing through the streets, under garlanded arches and flags flying from every window.This sounds lovely, but really was not—only curious, though it gave infinite satisfaction to the thousands of spectators, who on this day bring great wealth to the town. But oh! the noise and discomfort for an unwilling spectator—the organs, and peep-shows, and wild-beast shows, and ‘Boer and Briton’ shows, and horsemanship-ladies careering through the streets after the dancing was over. If any one wishes to know what the Inferno is like and the worst din the human mind can imagine, they should spend a ‘Furry Day;’ only, to be sure, at Helston all the people are quite good, which would probably make a very considerable difference!”
“Helston, May 10.—Yesterday I breakfasted in the coffee-room with an old gentleman who was exceedingly angry with me because I did not think Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey’ should be one of the twelve novels to be saved if all the rest in the world were swept away—‘only the most dense ignorance of literature’ could make me confess such a thing!
“It was a drive of ten miles in a grand and lonely landau through a country brilliant with gorse and blackthorn. Beneath a great plantation on the right was the Loe Pool, only separated by a strip of silver sand from the sea, and described in Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ Beyond a wooded hollow with rocks and fir trees the road enters upon the high-lying plain of the Lizard, wind-stricken, storm-swept, without a tree, the houses of ugly Lizard-town rising black against a pellucid sky on the horizon. A scrambling walk down a rugged lane, and then a pathlet marked by white stones above tremendous precipices brought meto Kynance Cove—a little disappointing, for it was high water when it ought to have been low, and a grey colourless day when it ought to have been brilliant. However, my drawing ‘answered,’ as Aunt Kitty would have said, and in two hours, as it began to mizzle, I was ready to return.”
“Tintagel, May 10.—The ‘girling’ of the sea in the old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ just expresses what one hears here. This ‘Wharncliffe Arms’ is an ideal inn, and very striking is the little glen, now so primrosy, with the black ruined castle, the cries of the seabirds—
‘And the great sea-waves below,Pulse of the midnight, beating slow.’”[596]
‘And the great sea-waves below,Pulse of the midnight, beating slow.’”[596]
“Royal Hotel, Bideford, May 15.—This house has beautiful old rooms built by John Davy, the first tobacco merchant, with splendid Italian ceilings: the littleRevengewas built in a shipping yard just before the house, and in a narrow street on the other side the river is a public-house which is the house of Sir Richard Grenville. I thought the path above the precipice at Lynton the most beautiful sea-walk I ever saw. In places it is a sheer wall of rock rising from the waves—
‘Which roar, rock-thwarted, under bellowing cavesBeneath the windy wall.’”
‘Which roar, rock-thwarted, under bellowing cavesBeneath the windy wall.’”
“Middlewick, Corsham, May 18.—The kind Clutterbucks, with whom I am staying, took me to Castlecombe yesterday, the home of the Scroopes forfive hundred years, and quite one of the most enchanting places in England, in its green glen, its clear rushing river, its exquisite church tower and old market-cross. I saw it last at nine years old, and was enchanted to find its loveliness all and more than I remembered. To-day we went to luncheon at Harnish, and I visited once more the little rectory where I was at school for three and a half most miserable years. How different a little boy’s path is now! We saw Corsham Court afterwards, with Cronje’s flag floating over its staircase.”
“Holmhurst, May 23.—I found a very large party on Saturday at hospitable Mr. Astor’s, and Cliveden in great beauty, entrancing carpets of bluebells under the trees. A telegram from the Queen of Sweden took me to Roehampton on Monday. It was twenty-two years since I had seen the King, and I thought him even handsomer and more royal-looking than of old. The Queen is not less fragile, and as full of good thoughts and words as ever. I had luncheon with the royal pair and their household, and a long talk with the Queen afterwards, who told me much of my especial Prince, now Regent in his father’s absence.”
“Pleasure to our hot graspGives flowers after flowers;With passionate warmth we graspHand after hand in ours:Now do we soon perceive how fast our youth is spent.”—Matthew Arnold.
“Pleasure to our hot graspGives flowers after flowers;With passionate warmth we graspHand after hand in ours:Now do we soon perceive how fast our youth is spent.”—Matthew Arnold.
“Oh, He has taught us what reply to make,Or secretly in spirit, or in words,If there be need, when sorrowing men complainThe fair illusions of their youth depart,All things are going from them, and to-dayIs emptier of delights than yesterday,Even as to-morrow will be barer yet:We have been taught to feel this need not be,This is not life’s inevitable law;But that the gladness we are called to knowIs an increasing gladness, that the soilOf the human heart, tilled rightly, will becomeRicher and deeper, fitted to bear fruitOf an immortal growth from day to day,Fruit of love, life, and inefficient joy.”—R. C Trench.
“Oh, He has taught us what reply to make,Or secretly in spirit, or in words,If there be need, when sorrowing men complainThe fair illusions of their youth depart,All things are going from them, and to-dayIs emptier of delights than yesterday,Even as to-morrow will be barer yet:We have been taught to feel this need not be,This is not life’s inevitable law;But that the gladness we are called to knowIs an increasing gladness, that the soilOf the human heart, tilled rightly, will becomeRicher and deeper, fitted to bear fruitOf an immortal growth from day to day,Fruit of love, life, and inefficient joy.”—R. C Trench.
“Lord, I owe thee a death: let it not be terrible: yet Thy will, not mine, be done.”—Hooker.
“Lord, I owe thee a death: let it not be terrible: yet Thy will, not mine, be done.”—Hooker.
“When the tapers now burn blue,And the comforters are few,And that number more than true,Sweet Spirit, comfort me!”—Herrick.
“When the tapers now burn blue,And the comforters are few,And that number more than true,Sweet Spirit, comfort me!”—Herrick.
I mUSTclose this book. Printers are calling for its last pages. It is like seeing an oldfriend go forth into a new world, and wondering if those who inhabit it will understand him and treat him well. Perhaps no one will read it except the intimate circle—a large one certainly—who have loved Hurstmonceaux, Stoke, and little Holmhurst at different times. But I can never regret having written it, and it has been so great an enjoyment to me, that perhaps others may like it; for I have concealed nothing, and Coleridge says, “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.”[597]
Most people will say two volumes would have been enough, but the fact is I have written chiefly for myself and my relations, and not for the general public at all. They may read the book if they like, but it was not intended for them, and, as Walter Scott describes it—
“Most men, when drawn to speak about themselves,Are moved by little and by little to say moreThan they first dreamt; until at last they blush,And can but hope to find secret excuseIn the self-knowledge of their auditors.”[598]
“Most men, when drawn to speak about themselves,Are moved by little and by little to say moreThan they first dreamt; until at last they blush,And can but hope to find secret excuseIn the self-knowledge of their auditors.”[598]
Except that I have seen more varieties of people than some do, I believe there has been nothing unusual in my life. All lives are made up of joys and sorrows with a little calm, neutral ground connecting them; though, from physical reasons perhaps, I think I have enjoyed the pleasures and suffered in the troubles more than most. But from the calm backwater of my present life at Holmhurst, as I overlook the past, the pleasures seem to predominate, and I could cordially answer to any one who asked me “Is life worth living?”—“Yes, to the very dregs.”
Sainte-Beuve says, “Il est donné, de nos jours, à un bien petit nombre, même parmi les plus délicats et ceux qui les apprécient le mieux, de recueillir, d’ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selon ses goûts, avec suite, avec noblesse.” And latterly my days have been “avec suite;” “avec noblesse” is what they ought to have been. In my quiet home, of which little has been said in these volumes, days succeed each other unmarked, but on the whole happy, though sometimes very lonely. The whole time passes very quickly, yet it is, as I remember the Grand Duchess Stephanie of Baden wrote to my aunt Mrs. Stanley—“In youth the years are long, the momentsshort, but in age the moments are long, the years short.” Really I have been alone here for thirty years, twelve in which my dearest Lea was still presiding over the lower regions of the house, and eighteen in absolute solitude. It is the winter evenings, after the early twilight has set in, which are the longest. Then there are often no voices but those of the past:—
“Time brought me many another friendThat loved me longer;New love was kind, but in the endOld love was stronger.Years come and go, no New Year yetHath slain December,And all that should have cried, Forget!Cried but—Remember!”
“Time brought me many another friendThat loved me longer;New love was kind, but in the endOld love was stronger.
Years come and go, no New Year yetHath slain December,And all that should have cried, Forget!Cried but—Remember!”
People say, “It is all your own fault that you are solitary; you ought to have married long ago.” But they know nothing about it; for as long as my mother lived, and for some time after, I had nothing whatever to marry upon, and after that I had very little, and I have been constantly reminded that people of the class in which I have always lived do not like to marry paupers. Besides, the fact is, that except in one impossible case perhaps,very long ago, “I have never loved any one well enough to put myself in a noose for them: it is a noose, you know.”[599]What I have to regret is that I have no very near relations who have in the least my own interests and sympathies, though they are all very kind to me. I have far more in common with many of my younger friends, “the boys,” who cease to be boys after a few years, and many of whom, I am sure, turn to Holmhurst as the haven of their lives. But one feels that there would be this difference between any very congenial near relations and even the kindest friends: the latter are very glad to see one, but would be very sorry to see more of one; whilst the former, if they existed, would take it as a matter of course.
By friends I often feel that I am greatly over-estimated, so many ask my advice, and act upon what I tell them. It is a responsibility, but I feel that I am right in urging what I have always found answer in my own case, and what has greatly added to my happiness. When a wrong, sometimes a very cruel wrong, is done to one, one must not try at once to do some good to those who have done it, because that would be to mortify them; butif one immediately, at once, sets to think of what one can do for somebody else, it takes out the taste. Then one can very soon paste down that unpleasant page of life, as if it had never existed, and all will be as before.
Also, always believe the best of people till the worst is proved, and meditate not on your miseries, but your blessings.
The greatest of all the blessings I have to be grateful for is, that though, since my serious illness six years ago, I have never been entirely without pain, I have, notwithstanding this, good health and a feeling of youth—just the same feeling I had forty years ago. I suppose there will be many who will be surprised to see in these pages how old I am; I am unspeakably surprised at it myself. I have to be perpetually reminding myself of my years, that I am so much nearer the close than the outset of life. I feel so young still, that I can hardly help making plans for quite the far-distant future, schemes of work and of travel, and I hope sometimes of usefulness, which of course can never be realised. I have very good spirits, and I feel that I should be inexcusable if I were not happy when I remember the contrast of my present life to my oppressed boyhood, or to theterrible trial of the time when every thought was occupied by such tangled perplexities as those of the Roman Catholic conspiracy.
My next greatest blessing is my home, so infinitely, so exquisitely suited to my needs, and indeed to all my wishes. As I write this, and look from my window across the tiny terrace with its brilliant flowers to the oakwoods, golden in the autumn sunset, and the blue sea beyond, with the craggy mass of Hastings Castle rising up against it, I feel that there are few places more lovely than Holmhurst. Then the walks in the grounds offer a constant variety of wood and rock, flowers and water, and the distant view changes constantly, and composes into a hundred pictures. And in the little circle of this pleasant home love assuredly reigns supreme. I look upon my servants as my best and truest friends; their rooms, in their way, are as pretty and comfortable as my own, and I believe that they have a real pleasure in serving me. We unite together in looking after our less fortunate friends, who come in batches, for a month each set, to the little Hospice in the grounds. I could not ask my servants to do this, but they are delighted to help me thus, as in everything. When one of our little household community,as has happened four times now, passes, in an honoured and cherished old age, from amongst us, we all mourn together, watch by the deathbed, and follow the flower-laden coffin to the grave.
My local affections are centred in Holmhurst now. Rome, which I was formerly even fonder of, is so utterly changed, it has lost its enchaining power, and, with the places, the familiar faces there have all passed away. I go there every third year, but not for pleasure, only because it is necessary for “Walks in Rome,” the one of my books which pays best.
In the summer I generally have guests at Holmhurst, but even then my mornings are passed in writing, and several twilight hours besides. In the evenings there is generally reading aloud, or there are drawings to be looked at, or if “the boys” are with me there are games. Then the early months of spring are often spent abroad, and the later in London, and in the autumn I have the opportunity of far more visits than I like to pay: so that I have quite sufficient people-seeing to prevent getting rusty, or at any rate to remind me of my utter insignificance in every society except my own. However, Reviews are aperfect antidote to all follies of vainglory. I used to be pained by the most abusive ones, though I generally learnt something from them. Latterly, however, I have been more aware of the indescribable incapacity and indolence of the writers, and have not cared at all. I a little wonder, however, why I have scarcely ever had a favourable Review. My work cannot always have been soterriblybad, or it would not have had so wide a circulation—wider, I think, than has attended any other work of the kind.
How I wish one knew something, anything, of the hereafter to which the Old Testament never alludes, and of which the New Testament tells us nothing satisfactory. Can we really sleep, for millions of years perhaps, or can we live in another hemisphere, or can we linger here near people and places we love, incorporeal, invisible? I believe all the truths of revealed religion, but there is so much that is unrevealed. Oh! if the disciples, during their three years’ opportunity, had only asked our Saviour a few more questions—questions so absolutely essential, to which the answers would have been of suchvitalimportance. For oh! how far more important what our state after death is than all our life’s work, than everythingwe have done or said or written, or what any one has thought of us. I can truly say with Olga de la Ferronays, “Je crois, j’aime, j’espère, je me repens;” but how strangely dim is the clearest sight as to the future. “The awful mysteries of life and nature,” says Whittier, “sometimes almost overwhelm me. What? Where? Whither? These questions sometimes hold me breathless. How little, after all, do we know! And the soul’s anchor of Faith can only grapple fast upon two or three things, and fast and surest of all upon the Fatherhood of God.”[600]
It is astonishing how little good can be derived from all the religious teaching which is the form and order of the day, from the endless monotony of services, from the wearisome sermons, not one of which remains with me from the thousands upon thousands I have been condemned to listen to, some few of them excellent, but most of them a farrago of stilted nonsense. I suppose that there are some types of mind which are benefited by them: I cannot believe that they were good for me. “Oh, stop, do stop; you have talked enough,” my whole heart has generally cried out when I have listened to a preacher—generally a man whom one would never dream of listening to in ordinary conversation for a quarter of an hour. It is a terrible penalty to pay for one’s religion to have weekly to hear it worried and tangled by these incapable and often arrogant beings. What does really remain with me, and raise my mind heavenwards with every thought of it, is the gentle teaching of my sweet mother in my childhood, and the practical lesson of her long life of love to God and man; the austere, unswerving uprightness and justice which was the mainspring of life’s action to the dear old nurse who was spared for forty-eight years to be the blessing of our home, ever one of those who, as Emerson says, “make the earth wholesome;” the remembrance of Hugh Pearson, Lady Waterford, and many other holy ones entered into the Perfect Life, and the certainty whence their peace in life and their calm in death was derived. Whittier again echoes my own thoughts when he says, “I regard Christianity as a life rather than a creed; and in judging my fellow-men, I can use no other standard than that which our Lord and Master has given us, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ The only orthodoxy that I am especially interested in is that of life and practice.”
I know my own great imperfection and unworthiness, and when I turn from myself to others, I cannot judge them. One cannot know all the secret guiding wires of action in them. I think perhaps the secret of any influence I have with boys is, that though I am willing to tell them what I think best as to the future, I never condemn their past; I am not called upon to do so. Southey’s lines come back to me:—
“Oh, what are we,Frail creatures that we are, that we should sitIn judgment man on man! And what were weIf the All-Merciful should mete to usWith the same rigorous measure wherewithalSinner to sinner metes!”[601]
“Oh, what are we,Frail creatures that we are, that we should sitIn judgment man on man! And what were weIf the All-Merciful should mete to usWith the same rigorous measure wherewithalSinner to sinner metes!”[601]
When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has been usually allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel so young, the evening of life is closing in. Perhaps it may not be so, perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s sunrise.”[602]
“La figure de ce monde passe. Sans lapossession de l’éternité, sans la vue religieuse de la vie, ces journées fugitives ne sont qu’un sujet d’effroi, le bonheur doit être une prière et le malheur aussi. Pense, aime, agis et souffris en Dieu; c’est la grande science.”[603]
“Seek out with earnest search the things above;Thence to God’s presence rise on wings of love.By Truth the veils of earth and sense are riven,And Glory is the only veil of Heaven.Seek’st thou by earthly roads to find thy way?Surprise will seize thy rein and bid thee stay;Only man’s Guardian has cross’d o’er that sea,And those whom He has bidden—‘Follow me.’He who has journeyed on without this Friend,Worn out, has failed to reach his journey’s end.Oh, Sàdi, think not man has ever goneAlong the path of Holiness alone,But only he who treads behind the Chosen One.”[604]“Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,Of that same time when no more Change shall be,But stedfast rest of all things, firmely staydUpon the pillours of Eternity,That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;For all that moveth doth in Change delight;But thence-forth all shall rest eternallyWith Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me thatSabaoth’s sight.”[605]
“Seek out with earnest search the things above;Thence to God’s presence rise on wings of love.By Truth the veils of earth and sense are riven,And Glory is the only veil of Heaven.Seek’st thou by earthly roads to find thy way?Surprise will seize thy rein and bid thee stay;Only man’s Guardian has cross’d o’er that sea,And those whom He has bidden—‘Follow me.’He who has journeyed on without this Friend,Worn out, has failed to reach his journey’s end.Oh, Sàdi, think not man has ever goneAlong the path of Holiness alone,But only he who treads behind the Chosen One.”[604]
“Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,Of that same time when no more Change shall be,But stedfast rest of all things, firmely staydUpon the pillours of Eternity,That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;For all that moveth doth in Change delight;But thence-forth all shall rest eternallyWith Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me thatSabaoth’s sight.”[605]
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