The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

Contents:

The Spirit of PlaceMrs. DingleySolitudeThe Lady of the LyricsJulyWellsThe FootHave Patience, Little SaintThe Ladies of the IdyllA DerivationA CounterchangeRainLetters of Marceline ValmoreThe Hours of SleepThe HorizonHabits and ConsciousnessShadows

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets haveall but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too muchinterpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessibleutterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature. 

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake togethera nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can youmake a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereaswedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling. Ihave known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the wholepeal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness madelight of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dancein his boots by a merry highwayman. 

The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer, and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild prisoners--by twosor threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives--one or twelve takingwing--they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are deliveredfrom the close hands of this actual present. Not in vain is the suddenupper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past. 

Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surelyafter but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France when onehas arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the bells in"Parsifal. " They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets, theyare the voices of an unknown tower; they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place, which is to be seen in the shapes of the fields andthe manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in thebreath of the earth, overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle ofsome black-smith, calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaksits local tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, andgreatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you knowhow familiar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the ears of thepeople. The bells are strange, and you know how homely they must be. Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect. 

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; andwhere it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abidesentire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. Theuntravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, butalways to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by-ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet andnimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Longwhite roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they givepromise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular andunforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to bemade. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such avisit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, thespirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and theconceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor isthere a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child. He is wellused to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is acondition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loudin the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies. 

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gaymeasures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in awedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile marchwith a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies. If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curiouslocal immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights. Their way isfor the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are nothymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells. Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in thesub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strengththat lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a littleart, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means. Ifit were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, forthose melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how somevillage musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for thebells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and whateffect of liberty. 

These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in theworld. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively. Thebelfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the timewhen Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But, needless to say, this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy. At that time they musthave had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, andgolden throats, precisely tuned. The hounds of Theseus had not a morejust scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry holds in leash. But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in theorder of the game of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made byman this is by far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from thegreat churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries thebells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does notring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, anddignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly fills the country. 

The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimblebells. Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can thereforehear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no other bells inearshot. Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set open to the cloud, on a _festa_ morning, to let fly those soft-voiced flocks, but thenearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune isuninterrupted. Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequesteredart of composing melodies for bells--charming division of an art, havingits own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding bylaw--dwells in these solitary places. No tunes in a town would get thishearing, or would be made clear to the end of their frolic amid such awide and lofty silence. 

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; thecustom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous touristcomplain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hearan honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous tourist has not, perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal tohim to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one byone, the belfries stand and play their tunes. Variable are those lonelymelodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful airis played for the burial of a villager. 

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells thatseems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten whenthe mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought toearth's untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew, that sways acrossone of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--"the wide-watered. "

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1} All we have to callher by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, withwhom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand timesthan life, as hope saved. " MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eighttimes in a line for the pleasure of writing it. "MD sometimes meansStella alone, " says one of many editors. "The letters were writtennominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley, " says another, "but it does notrequire to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that theywere penned. " Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And theeditor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, againstthe word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined thatthey make the "she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paperof reparation to Mrs. Dingley. 

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. Inlove "to divide is not to take away, " as Shelley says; and Dingley's halfof the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothingfrom the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has foughtagainst Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalist--he finds herirksome. Through one of his most modern representatives he has butlately called her a "chaperon. " A chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has beenpressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respectbeen spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD, ""saucy little, pretty, dear rogues, " "little monkeys mine, " "littlemischievous girls, " "nautinautinautidear girls, " "brats, " "huzzies both, ""impudence and saucy-face, " "saucy noses, " "my dearest lives anddelights, " "dear little young women, " "good dallars, not crying dallars"(which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD, " and so forth in ahundred repetitions. They are, every now and then, "poor MD, " butobviously not because of their own complaining. Swift called them sobecause they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved, conscious every day of the price, which is death. 

The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with hissummary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately put themasunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than foolishly playhavoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most secluded thing inthe world. "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters, except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done. But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend:but methinks, " he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but weare not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; itlooks like PMD. " Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, youmust know, are not women. " "God Almighty preserve you both and make ushappy together. " "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we maynever be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives. " "Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happyday since he left you, as hope saved. "

With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar ofSt. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was"in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting. " He hid with them in thelong labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning. If noletter came, he comforted himself with thinking that "he had it yet to behappy with. " And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold andlachrymose blunders the grace and singularity--the distinction--of thissweet romance. "Little, sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though"the many could not miss it, " but not even the few have found it. 

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella shouldbe the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from Swift. But dayand night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's little letters; hewaits upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of journal, and when it isfull I will send it whether MD writes or not; and so that will bepretty. " "Naughty girls that will not write to a body!" "I wish youwere whipped for forgetting to send. Go, be far enough, negligentbaggages. " "You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and then comesDingley altogether, and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and thenconclude with something handsome and genteel, as 'your most humblecumdumble. '" But Scott and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedinglysorry for Stella. 

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task: "Hereis such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must be writingevery night; O Lord, O Lord!" "I must go write idle things, and twittletwattle. " "These saucy jades take up so much of my time with writing tothem in the morning. " Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingleythat she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her name andmemory? When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is "writingin bed, like a tiger, " she should go gay in the eyes of all generations. 

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will notlet Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry come up!Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken veryseriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then? That wouldhave been no ill share for Dingley. But no, forsooth, Dingley is allowednothing. 

There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from her. Fornow and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does so he invariablydrops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and "D" or"Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to this anywhere. He isanxious about Stella's "little eyes, " and about her health generally;whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "newfever, " because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?" AndMrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford. "I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though notso bad as Stella; she tells thumpers. " Stella is often reproved for herspelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is apuzzle-headed woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourthletter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goodyBlunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to excepta letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No, little Dingley, I amalways in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself. " "You are apretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and 'fifth' in the margin, and your 'journal' and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we shallnever have done. " "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything. " Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries forhis health. He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of hisprattle. Both women--MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancythat Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer. "

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in hislodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland. "He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I saynothing; I am as tame as a clout. "

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, ina hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimedwife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to have gonestripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks toMD's prayers, " wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a privatefragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, norfor any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen allthe credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that piousbenediction. 

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilizationhas been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom civilization hasgiven little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, itsshavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a rightforegone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in thecase of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of thenearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged togetherinto some blind by-way. 

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, andvirtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they areignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they ownfor every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of noobscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closedcorners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they commandso much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not howto wish. 

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof, landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods, and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured bymiles; they are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely thedominion of every man for the day of his possession. There is lonelinessfor innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of theearth; no one is refused. Nor is the space shortened or the silencemarred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone therebefore. Solitude is separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to benumbered by days, but by men themselves. Every man of the living andevery man of the dead might have had his "privacy of light. "

It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country; and athicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult to get fora time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude be enclosed, itis still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes, " and aspace of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding-place. But the best solitude does not hide at all. 

This the people who have drifted together into the streets live wholelives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation of even thesolitude of the hiding-place? There are many who never have a whole houralone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as peoplemay in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one anotherand not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to avagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps theunconscious loss which is futile and barren. 

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all theirsolitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or thehospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible, without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice ofaction and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, andthey have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitudedeferred. 

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone andinaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many adrawing of J. F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girlstands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for theclosing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out ofsight. 

Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaboratepossession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude ofa woman with a child. A newly-born child is so nursed and talked about, handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so muchimportunate service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone longenough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood movesseparately, beside her, with another rhythm and different pulses. All iscommonplace until the doors are closed upon the two. This uniqueintimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion. It is more thansingle solitude; it is a redoubled isolation more remote than mountains, safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea. 

That solitude partaken--the only partaken solitude in the world--is thePoint of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a betrayalof that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of allcrimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between awoman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as achild's foot runs. But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is thatof a woman against her child. Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers, are held to excuse her. She gains the mostslovenly of indulgences and the grossest compassion, on the vulgargrounds that her crime was easy. 

Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim to-day, by theway, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from commonopinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the situation. Hewas master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was his secret, and thepublic was not privy to his artistic conscience. He does violence to theobligations of which he is aware, and which the world does not know veryexplicitly. Nothing is easier. Or he is lawless in a more literalsense, but only hopes the world will believe that he has a whole code ofhis own making. It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to breakobvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the public, and to abidethe common rebuke. 

It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for thepreparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and wideand long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of theaccessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside, is enough to lead thither. 

A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very sincerely. Inorder to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep the publishedpromise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusionor of a very life of loneliness. He should have gained the state ofsolitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike any other. Thetraveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost life-longsolitude is possible knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures hehas seen in desert places there. Their loneliness is broken by hispassage, it is true, but hardly so to them. They look at him, but theyare not aware that he looks at them. Nay, they look at him as thoughthey were invisible. Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is inthe wild degree. They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they arecurious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone. Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that lookin any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a life-long solitary. He never bore himself as though he were invisible. He never had theimpersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling. Millet would not even havetaken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvansolitudes of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wildsolitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude. 

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, sothere is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. Itis the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression. It isthe quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but readyglance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who haveneither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, noflight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in thestreet, no hope of news from solitary counsels. 

THE LADY OF THE LYRICS

She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding. But the sixteenth century tookher for granted as the object of song; she was a class, a state, a sex. It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist's time--time that went sogaily to metre as not to brook delays--in making her out too clearly. Shehad no more of what later times call individuality than has the rose, herrival, her foil when she was kinder, her superior when she was cruel, herever fresh and ever conventional paragon. She needed not to be devisedor divined; she was ready. A merry heart goes all the day; the lyrist'snever grew weary. Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any otherdaily things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity. 

The lady of the lyrics was not loved in mortal earnest, and herpunishment now and then for her ingratitude was to be told that she wasloved in jest. She did not love; her fancy was fickle; she was not movedby long service, which, by the way, was evidently to be taken for grantedprecisely like the whole long past of a dream. She had not a goodtemper. When the poet groans it seems that she has laughed at him; whenhe flouts her, we may understand that she has chidden her lyrist in notemperate terms. In doing this she has sinned not so much against him asagainst Love. With that she is perpetually reproved. The lyristcomplains to Love, pities Love for her scorning, and threatens to go awaywith Love, who is on his side. The sweetest verse is tuned to love whenthe loved one proves worthy. 

There is no record of success for this policy. She goes on dancing orscolding, as the case may be, and the lyrist goes on boasting of hisconstancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day. The situation hasvariants, but no surprise or ending. The lover's convention is explicitenough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the lady's. Pride inher beauty, at any rate, is hers--pride so great that she cannot bringherself to perceive the shortness of her day. She is so unobservant asto need to be told that life is brief, and youth briefer than life; thatthe rose fades, and so forth. 

Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived. Buttaking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how isit she did not discover these things unaided? Why does the loverinvariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his ownpraise and poetry? Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any ofthese matters. Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth inone whose truth would be of little moment? And why was the convention sopleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age--nay, two greatages--of literature?

Music seems to be principally answerable. For the lyrics of the lady are"words for music" by a great majority. There is hardly a single poem inthe Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that has what would in ourday be called a tone of sentiment. Music had not then the tone herself;she was ingenious, and so must the words be. She had the air of epigram, and an accurately definite limit. So, too, the lady of the lyrics, whomight be called the lady of the stanzas, so strictly does she go bymeasure. When she is quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness; when shedances, she does it by a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrilysung to such grave notes. 

So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books isallowed to be kind enough for a "melody, " except one lady only. She maythus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is"brown. " She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower, " but the song madefor her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis. The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely thanthe brown. 

Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerableverses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal, and inconstantwith the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day;and neither verse nor music will ever make such another lady. Sherefused to observe the transiency of roses; she never reallyintended--much as she was urged--to be a shepherdess; she was neverpersuaded to mitigate her dress. In return, the world has let herdisappear. She scorned the poets until they turned upon her in theepigram of many a final couplet; and of these the last has been longwritten. Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and shefrightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations aregone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was somethingless than mortal. 

But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady of theunanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite littletalents. She was not set for singing, but poetry spoke of her; sometimeswhen she was sleeping, and then Fletcher said--

 None can rock Heaven to sleep but her. 

Or when she was singing, and Carew rhymed--

 Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale when May is past; For in your sweet dividing throat She winters, and keeps warm her note. 

Sometimes when the lady was dead, and Carew, again, wrote on hermonument--

 And here the precious dust is laid, Whose purely-tempered clay was made So fine that it the guest betrayed. 

But there was besides another Lady of the lyrics; one who will never passfrom the world, but has passed from song. In the sixteenth century andin the seventeenth century this lady was Death. Her inspiration neverfailed; not a poet but found it as fresh as the inspiration of life. Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable thought in those days, as it isin ours, and the phrase lost no dignity by the integrity of use. 

To every man it happens that at one time of his life--for a space ofyears or for a space of months--he is convinced of death with anincomparable reality. It might seem as though literature, living thelife of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages. Death was asoften on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands, but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts. The discovery ofdeath did not shake the poets from their composure. On the contrary, theverse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves inhonour of this Lady of the lyrics. Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerkywriter when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn;but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, areinfinitely noble. These are, needless to say, meditations upon death bylaw and violence; and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne, written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife--"Now, Sweet-cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thydeservings"--and singularly beautiful prose is this. So also areSouthwell's words. But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramaticthan was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age. 

It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business oflife--not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness--that wasthe Lady of the lyrists. Nor was their song of the act of dying. Withthis a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself. Thosetwo centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and thatits equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth whichthey took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable. Theynever wearied of the wonder. The poetry of our day has an entirelydifferent emotion for death as parting. It was not parting that thelyrists sang of; it was the mere simplicity of death. None of ourcontemporaries will take such a subject; they have no more than theordinary conviction of the matter. For the great treatment of obviousthings there must evidently be an extraordinary conviction. 

But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be theimplacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has equally passedfrom before the eyes of poets. 

JULY

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of thegreen of leaves. It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in theirdifferences of character and not of mere date. Almost all the green isgrave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a daily colour, inmajestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, toinconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks afterthe dawn. 

Gravity is the word--not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as atnight. The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty, commonfreshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and day. Inchildhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrisethan we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far highersensibility for April and April evenings--a heartache for them, which inriper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled. 

But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find dailythings tedious, and familiar things importunate, that it has no greatdelight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness of the summerthat has ceased to change visibly. The poetry of mere day and of latesummer becomes perceptible to mature eyes that have long ceased to besated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot now find anything innature too familiar; eyes which have, indeed, lost sight of the furtherawe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer see so much of the past in Apriltwilight as they saw when they had no past; but which look freshly at thedailiness of green summer, of early afternoon, of every sky of any formthat comes to pass, and of the darkened elms. 

Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting close, unthrilled. Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it looks alone toa late sun. But if one could go by all the woods, across all the oldforests that are now meadowlands set with trees, and could walk a countygathering trees of a single kind in the mind, as one walks a gardencollecting flowers of a single kind in the hand, would not the harvest bea harvest of poplars? A veritable passion for poplars is a mostintelligible passion. The eyes do gather them, far and near, on a wholeday's journey. Not one is unperceived, even though great timber shouldbe passed, and hill-sides dense and deep with trees. The fancy makes apoplar day of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; forthe poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be allvarious, but the poplars are separate. 

All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with them)shake themselves perpetually free of the motionless forest. It is easyto gather them. Glances sent into the far distance pay them a flash ofrecognition of their gentle flashes; and as you journey you are suddenlyaware of them close by. Light and the breezes are as quick as the eyesof a poplar-lover to find the willing tree that dances to be seen. 

No lurking for them, no reluctance. One could never make for oneself anoak day so well. The oaks would wait to be found, and many would bemissed from the gathering. But the poplars are alert enough for atraveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do not sleep. Fromwithin some little grove of other trees a single poplar makes a slightsign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep the wind. They are salienteverywhere, and full of replies. They are as fresh as streams. 

It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars. Andyet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled witha cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize theirunfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplarand the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and the deepest summer will notfind a day in which they do not keep awake. No waters are so vigilant, even where a lake is bare to the wind. 

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingerscool as aspen leaves, " he knew the coolest thing in the world. It is acoolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on bothsides--the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, nogold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he canshine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. Youmay have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all thewoods are close. 

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees, beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nordid the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibratingPleiades. 

WELLS

The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractivesecrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means oflife. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumbersets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, theyare carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when theirvoices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly besaid that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whetherearthly or heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of thiscapture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that isnot a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. Forstyle implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, asit were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secretways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to besecured by a system of little shufflings and surprises. 

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings;they form its very construction. Style does not exist in modernarrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all thesuccesses--which are not to be denied--of their outer part; the happylittle swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence, being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the triumphand success of the present art of raiment--"fit" itself--is but theresult of a masked and lurking labour and device. 

The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of thebeauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and slighteractions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way. In a word, the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterousprovider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-appointed, anddecorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas theartist craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means. Thefirst hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes whichwe all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the secondlifted up the arches of the aqueduct. 

The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way tougliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure way. Inall countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden meansmust needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity. Thisis easy to understand, but it is less easy to explain the ill-fortunethat presses upon the expert workman, in search of easy ways to live, allthe ill-favoured materials, makes them cheap for him, makes themserviceable and effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and interthem, turning the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the dailyworld. It is an added mischance. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy toexplain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which are, after all, only less expert ways of labour. In those happy conditions, neither from the material, suggesting to the workman, nor from theworkman looking askance at his unhandsome material, comes a firstproposal to pour in cement and make fast the underworld, out of sight. But fate spares not that suggestion to the able and the unlucky at theirtask of making neat work of the means, the distribution, the traffick oflife. 

The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the meansof our lives those which we should wish to see open to the sun, withtheir waters on their progress and their way to us; but, no, they arelapped in lead. 

King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals. 

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding-placethat nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells are, attheir deepest, in communication with the open sky. No other mine is sovisited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine tothink of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all chargedwith shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carryingthat remote fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness. Not apool without this visitant, or without passages of stars. As for thewells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as thedaily bathing-places of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatterfitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within thosedeeps. 

Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the sun isshattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken across stones, and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that fall throughchestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile figures of leaves. Toall these waters the agile air has perpetual access. Not so can greattowns be watered, it will be said with reason; and this is precisely theill-luck of great towns. 

Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have thegrace of visible wells; such as Venice, where every _campo_ has itscircle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the pavement, itssoft kiss of the copper vessel with the surface of the water below, andthe cheerful work of the cable. 

Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their plainwith the strong, steady, and level flight of arches from the watershedsin the hills to the and city; and having the waters captive, they knewhow to compel them to take part, by fountains, in this Roman triumph. They had the wit to boast thus of their brilliant prisoner. 

None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a moreinvincible liberty of the heart. And the captivity and the leap of theheart of the waters have outlived their captors. They have remained inRome, and have remained alone. Over them the victory was longer thanempire, and their thousands of loud voices have never ceased to confessthe conquest of the cold floods, separated long ago, drawn one by one, alive, to the head and front of the world. 

Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact ofRome. You could not look to the city from the mountains or to thedistance from the city without seeing the approach of those perpetualwaters--waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services. This, then, was the style of a master, who does not lapse from "incidentalgreatness, " has no mean precision, out of sight, to prepare the finish ofhis phrases, and does not think the means and the approaches are to beplotted and concealed. Without anxiety, without haste, and withoutmisgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption inthe doing nor ruin after they are done finds anything in them to betray. There was never any disgrace of means, and when the world sees the workbroken through there is no disgrace of discovery. The labour ofMichelangelo's chisel, little more than begun, a Roman structure longexposed in disarray--upon these the light of day looks full, and theRoman and the Florentine have their unrefuted praise. 

THE FOOT

Time was when no good news made a journey, and no friend came near, but awelcome was uttered, or at least thought, for the travelling feet of thewayfarer or the herald. The feet, the feet were beautiful on themountains; their toil was the price of all communication, and theirreward the first service and refreshment. They were blessed and bathed;they suffered, but they were friends with the earth; dews in grass atmorning, shallow rivers at noon, gave them coolness. They must havegrown hard upon their mountain paths, yet never so hard but they neededand had the first pity and the readiest succour. It was never easy forthe feet of man to travel this earth, shod or unshod, and his feet aredelicate, like his colour. 

If they suffered hardship once, they suffer privation now. Yet the feetshould have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything elseabout us. It is their calling; and the hands might be glad to be strokedfor a day by grass and struck by buttercups, as the feet are of those whogo barefoot; and the nostrils might be flattered to be, like them, solong near moss. The face has only now and then, for a resting-while, their privilege. 

If our feet are now so severed from the natural ground, they haveinevitably lost life and strength by the separation. It is only theentirely unshod that have lively feet. Watch a peasant who never wearsshoes, except for a few unkind hours once a week, and you may see theplay of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic as hishands. Fresh as the air, brown with the light, and healthy from thefield, not used to darkness, not grown in prison, the foot of the_contadino_ is not abashed. It is the foot of high life that is prim, and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions, for it has forgottenliberty. It is more active now than it lately was--certainly the foot ofwoman is more active; but whether on the pedal or in the stirrup, or cladfor a walk, or armed for a game, or decked for the waltz, it is in bonds. It is, at any rate, inarticulate. 

It has no longer a distinct and divided life, or none that is visible andsensible. Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinitedistinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it were, with everynerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was believed of them ofold that each one had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much aspossible, deprived of all that delicate distinction: undone, unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of indiscriminate life. It is asthough a landscape with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudelypainted with the blank--blank, not simple--generalities of a vulgar hand. Or as though one should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in awholesale fashion, not "turning the hours to moments, " which joy can doto the full as perfectly as pain. 

The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its languageconfused. When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin, andher glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with, not aboot. Yet Amarantha's foot is as lovely as her hand. It, too, has a"tender inward"; no wayfaring would ever make it look anything butdelicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her through a night ofdances; it does, in fact, but balance her. It is fit to cling to theground, but rather for springing than for rest. 

And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its littlesurface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy anarchitectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. It is a part ofvital design and has a history; and man does not go erect but at a priceof weariness and pain. How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: fornothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a nakedfoot. 

Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a seasonamongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, isnaturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes her armed heelheard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow. The vintager is not heard among the vines, nor the harvester on histhreshing-floor of stone. There is a kind of simple stealth in theircoming and going, and they show sudden smiles and dark eyes in and out ofthe rows of harvest when you thought yourself alone. The lack of noisein their movement sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughterfloats. 

But we shall not praise the "simple, sweet" and "earth-confiding feet"enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for the time of song. IfPoetry was first divided by the march, and next varied by the dance, thento the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the thought, the instruction, and the dream that could not speak by prose. Out of that little physicallaw, then, grew a spiritual law which is one of the greatest things weknow; and from the test of the foot came the ultimate test of thethinker: "Is it accepted of Song?"

The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little trivial rules oftime and exactitude, not to be broken, laws that are made secure againstthe restlessness of the heart fretting for insignificantliberties--trivial laws to restrain from a trivial freedom. And withinthe gate of these laws which seem so small, lies the world of mysticvirtue. They enclose, they imply, they lock, they answer for it. Lesservirtues may flower in daily liberty and may flourish in prose; butinfinite virtues and greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry, and obey the constraint of an hourly convent bell. It is no wonder thatevery poet worthy the name has had a passion for metre, for the veryverse. To him the difficult fetter is the condition of an interior rangeimmeasurable. 

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesyceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communicationwith a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle;there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; areluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office;a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for apurse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word orsign, nothing whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, ora calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face andbreathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes toyou on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it. Butthe beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, norecognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid inhis direction, and never a word to excuse you. 

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used tonothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to thebeggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning. " Whencomplaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit butwhat is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy withmore lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit ofmanner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To thesimply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is astriking thing; it is significant of so much. 

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligibleact of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the casteanswering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example. Anelderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certainnumber of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literallytranslated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil, " and the last wordshe naturally puts into the feminine. 

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the localdialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms asnothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase toEnglish readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent womanwho uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile. It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannotrecall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrastit is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of correspondingstation in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we havenothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currentlyby rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of allspeakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect"familiar, but by no means vulgar. " Besides, even if our Englishwomancould by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil, " she would still not have the opportunityof putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does socomplete the character of the sentence. 

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase ofexcuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And everywhere inthe South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins tobeg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter, " you canhardly reply without kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly wellknown, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in therich; but about the by-ways and remoter places there must still be somedismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensivehaughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received bytravellers. 

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphaticallyas we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly putthemselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there;but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appealsvaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does notseem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, ascruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty andthe thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicatingthat dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of asimply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. Itis not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal ofintercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress thoseconditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny thepresence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, becausefortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it inthe indifference of the wise. "Have patience, little saint, " is a phrasethat might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligiblefortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among themost barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among thestones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread. Thepeople, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, andbeg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwontedfigure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some formof refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth whileto remember--is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to theportent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds thatof ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is madeto understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent tothe violence of the rich. 

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a beggar isstill merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort usto see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardlyintended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon the morals of the road. He no longer truststhe world with a sight of his gaiety. He is not a wholeheartedmendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance wherebyan unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind. Themerry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touchesof chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptibleto the seated and stable social world. 

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled ourliterature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, bytradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has beenstopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, ledunderground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song ofthe distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, haveceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears. But it seemsthat the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still thesubject of a Spanish song. 

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it isnot a song of violence or fear. It is the random trolling note of a manwho owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-fortune, but takesit by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand ofunreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force. It seems, therefore, the song of anindomitable liberty of movement, light enough for the puffs of a zephyrchance. 

THE LADIES OF THE IDYLL

Little Primrose dames of the English classic, the wife and daughters ofthe Vicar of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of lady. Itis given to them in this page because Goldsmith himself gave it to themin the yet undepreciated state of the word, and for the better reasonthat he obviously intended them to be the equals of the men to whom hemarries them, those men being, with all their faults, gentlemen. Goldsmith, in a word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding, butcertainly fit for membership of that large class of various fortunewithin which the name makes a sufficient equality. 

He, their author, thought them sufficient. Having amused himselfingeniously throughout the story with their nameless vulgarities, hefinally hurries them into so much sentiment as may excuse the conventionof heroes in love. He plays with their coarseness like a perfectlypleased and clever showman, and then piously and happily shuts up hiscouples--the gentle Dr. Primrose with his abominable Deborah; theexcellent Mr. Burchell with the paltry Sophia; Olivia--but no, Olivia isnot so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured husband ready forher in a state of ignominy, but she has also a forgotten farmer somewherein the background--the unhappy man whom, with her father's permission, this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that his wooing mightpluck forward the lagging suit of the squire. 

Olivia, then, plays her common trick upon the harmless Williams, herfather conniving, with a provision that he urges with some demonstrationof virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer happy if the proposal ofthe squire be not after all forthcoming. But it is so evident her authorknew no better, that this matter may pass. It involves a point ofhonour, of which no one--neither the maker of the book nor anyone hemade--is aware. What is better worth considering is the fact thatGoldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladiesof the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to beexpected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughtersof a scholar. The education of women had sunk into a degradation neverreached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men. It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any Englishbook without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitelylimited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and thegooseberry wine. Any of those industries is a better and more liberalbusiness than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing. Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately ofthat century or of an unlettered state. What is really unhandsome is thenew, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen. 

That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a villageworldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent, foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almostinnocently natural, in Goldsmith's story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose isall this. He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charminglyhumorous passage in the book, to praise her for her "prudence, economy, and obedience. " Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give herhusband an occasion for rebuking her as "Woman!" This is done, forexample, when, despite her obedience, she refuses to receive that unluckyschemer, her own daughter, returned in ruins, without insulting her bythe sallies of a kitchen sarcasm. 

She plots with her daughters the most disastrous fortune hunt. She hasgiven them a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear lest thepaltry Sophia should lose her heart to the good, the sensible Burchell, who had saved her life; for he has no fortune. Mrs. Primrose beginsgrotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes at dinner, and sheends upon the last page, anxious, amid the general happiness, in regardto securing the head of the table. Upon these feminine humours theauthor sheds his Vicar's indulgent smile. What a smile for aself-respecting husband to be pricked to smile! A householder wouldwince, one would think, at having opportunity to bestow its toleranceupon his cook. 

Between these two housewifely appearances, Mrs. Primrose potters throughthe book; plots--always squalidly; talks the worst kinds of folly; takesthe lead, with a loud laugh, in insulting a former friend; crushes herrepentant daughter with reproaches that show envy rather thanindignation, and kisses that daughter with congratulation upon hearingthat she had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted a validmarriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes common and unclean everythingshe touches; has but two really gentle and tender moments all through thestory; and sets, once for all, the example in literature of the woman wefind thenceforth, in Thackeray, in Douglas Jerrold, in Dickens, and _unpeu partout_. 

Hardly less unspiritual, in spite of their conventional romance of youthand beauty, are the daughters of the squalid one. The author, in makingthem simple, has not abstained from making them cunning. Their vanitiesare well enough, but these women are not only vain, they are so enviousas to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law--one who is their rival in noway except in so much as she is a contemporary beauty. "Miss ArabellaWilmot, " says the pious father and vicar, "was allowed by all (except mytwo daughters) to be completely pretty. "

They have been left by their father in such brutal ignorance as to beinstantly deceived into laughing at bad manners in error for humour. Theyhave no pretty or sensitive instincts. "The jests of the rich, " says theVicar, referring to his own young daughters as audience, "are eversuccessful. " Olivia, when the squire played off a dullish joke, "mistookit for humour. She thought him, therefore, a very fine gentleman. " Thepowders and patches for the country church, the ride thither onBlackberry, in so strange a procession, the face-wash, the dreams andomens, are all good gentle comedy; we are completely convinced of thetedium of Mrs. Primrose's dreams, which she told every morning. Butthere are other points of comedy that ought not to precede an author'sappeal to the kind of sentiment about to be touched by the tragic scenesof _The Vicar of Wakefield_. 

In odd sidling ways Goldsmith bethinks himself to give his principalheroine a shadow of the virtues he has not bestowed upon her. When theunhappy Williams, above-mentioned, has been used in vain by Olivia, andthe squire has not declared himself, and she is on the point of keepingher word to Williams by marrying him, the Vicar creates a situation outof it all that takes the reader roundly by surprise: "I frequentlyapplauded her resolution in preferring happiness to ostentation. " Thegood Goldsmith! Here is Olivia perfectly frank with her father as to herexceedingly sincere preference for ostentation, and as to her stratagemto try to obtain it at the expense of honour and of neighbour Williams;her mind is as well known to her father as her father's mind is known toOliver Goldsmith, and as Oliver Goldsmith's, Dr. Primrose's, and Olivia'sminds are known to the reader. And in spite of all, your Goldsmith andyour Vicar turn you this phrase to your very face. You hardly know whichway to look; it is so disconcerting. 

Seeing that Olivia (with her chance-recovered virtue) and Sophia may bothbe expected to grow into the kind of matronhood represented by theirmother, it needs all the conditions of fiction to surround the close oftheir love-affairs with the least semblance of dignity. Nor, in fact, can it be said that the final winning of Sophia is an incident that errsby too much dignity. The scene is that in which Burchell, revealed asSir William Thornhill, feigns to offer her in marriage to thegood-natured rogue, Jenkinson, fellow prisoner with her father, in orderthat, on her indignant and distressed refusal, he may surprise heragreeably by crying, "What? Not have him? If that be the case, I thinkI must have you myself. " Even for an avowedly eccentric master of whims, this is playing with forbidden ironies. True, he catches her to hisbreast with ardour, and calls her "sensible. " "Such sense and suchheavenly beauty, " finally exclaims the happy man. Let us make him apresent of the heavenly beauty. It is the only thing not disproved, notdispraised, not disgraced, by a candid study of the Ladies of the Idyll. 

A DERIVATION

By what obscure cause, through what ill-directed industry, and under theconstraint of what disabling hands, had the language of English poetrygrown, for an age, so rigid that a natural writer at the end of theeighteenth century had much ado to tell a simple story in sufficientverse? All the vital exercise of the seventeenth century had left thelanguage buoyant; it was as elastic as deep and mobile waters; thenfollowed the grip of that incapacitating later style. Much later, English has been so used as to become flaccid--it has been stretched, asit were, beyond its power of rebound, or certainly beyond its power ofrebound in common use (for when a master writes he always uses a tonguethat has suffered nothing). It is in our own day that English has beenso over-strained. In Crabbe's day it had been effectually curbed, hindered, and hampered, and it cannot be said of Crabbe that he was amaster who takes natural possession of a language that has sufferednothing. He was evidently a man of talent who had to take his part withthe times, subject to history. To call him a poet was a mere convention. There seems to be not a single moment of poetry in his work, andassuredly if he had known the earlier signification of the word he wouldhave been the last man to claim the incongruous title of poet. But it isimpossible to state the question as it would have presented itself toCrabbe or to any other writer of his quality entering into the sameinheritance of English. 

It is true that Crabbe read and quoted Milton; so did all hiscontemporaries; and to us now it seems that poetry cannot have beenforgotten by any age possessing _Lycidas_. Yet that age can scarcely besaid to have in any true sense possessed _Lycidas_. There are otherthings, besides poetry, in Milton's poems. We do not entirely know, perhaps, but we can conjecture how a reader in Crabbe's late eighteenthcentury, looking in Milton for authority for all that he unluckily andvainly admired, would well find it. He would find the approval ofYoung's "Night Thoughts" did he search for it, as we who do not searchfor it may not readily understand. A step or so downwards, from a fewpassages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained, " an inevitable dropin the derivation, a depression such as is human, and everything, fromDryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes, " follows, without violence andperhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet Milton fathered, legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity. Milton, therefore, who mighthave kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights of poetry bylines like these--

 Who sing and singing in their glory move--

by this, and by many and many another so divine--Milton justified alsothe cold excesses of his posterity by the example of more than one groupof blank verse lines in his greatest poem. Manifestly the sanction is amatter of choice, and depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found inMilton such ancestry as it was fit for. 

Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry. But he came into possession of ametrical form charged by secondary poets with a contented second-classdignity that bears constant reference, in the way of respect rather thanof imitation, to the state and nobility of Pope at his best--the couplet. The weak yet rigid "poetry" that fell to his lot owed all the decorum itpossessed to the mechanical defences and props--the exclusionsespecially--of this manner of versification. The grievous thing wasthat, being moved to write simply of simple things, he had no more suppleEnglish for his purpose. His effort to disengage the phrase--longcommitted to convention and to an exposed artifice--did but prove howsurely the ancient vitality was gone. 

His preface to "The Borough, a Poem, " should be duly read before the"poem" itself, for the prose has a propriety all its own. Everything isconceived with the most perfect moderation, and then presented in a formof reasoning that leaves you no possible ground of remonstrance. Inproposing his subject Crabbe seems to make an unanswerable apology with acomposure that is almost sweet. For instance, at some length and withsome nobility he anticipates a probable conjecture that his work was done"without due examination and revisal, " and he meets the conjecturedcriticism thus: "Now, readers are, I believe, disposed to treat with morethan common severity those writers who have been led into presumption bythe approbation bestowed upon their diffidence, and into idleness andunconcern by the praises given to their attention. " It would not bepossible to say a smaller thing with greater dignity and gentleness. Itis worth while to quote this prose of a "poet" who lived between thecenturies, if only in order to suggest the chastening thought, "It is apity that no one, however little he may have to say, says it now in thisform!" The little, so long as it is reasonable, is so well suited inthis antithesis and logic. Is there no hope that journalism will evertake again these graces of unanswerable argument? No: they would nolonger wear the peculiar aspect of adult innocence that was Crabbe's. 

A COUNTERCHANGE

"Il s'est trompe de defunte. " The writer of this phrase had his sense ofthat portly manner of French, and his burlesque is fine; but--the paradoxmust be risked--because he was French he was not able to possess all itsgrotesque mediocrity to the full; that is reserved for the Englishreader. The words are in the mouth of a widower who, approaching hiswife's tomb, perceives there another "monsieur. " "Monsieur, " again; theFrench reader is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its place;it says little or nothing to him, whereas the Englishman, who has no wordof the precise bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but whomust use one of two English words of different allusion--man or Igentleman--knows the exact value of its commonplace. The seriousParisian, then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there hadbeen a divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is notyet aware of this, and explains to himself the presence of "un monsieur"in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de defunte. "

The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with nationalcharacter is to cause an English reader to pity the mocking author whowas debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his owncomedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishmandoes possess it. Your official, your professional Parisian has avocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novelistperceives this he does not perceive it all, because some of the words arethe only words in use. Take an author at his serious moments, when he isnot at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and thentouches a word that has its burlesque by mere contrast with English. "L'Histoire d'un Crime, " of Victor Hugo, has so many of these touches asto be, by a kind of reflex action, a very school of English. The wholeincident of the omnibus in that grave work has unconscious internationalcomedy. The Deputies seated in the interior of the omnibus had been, itwill be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the perpetrator of theCoup d'Etat, but each had his official scarf. Scarf--pish!--"l'echarpe!""Ceindre l'echarpe"--there is no real English equivalent. Civicresponsibility never was otherwise adequately expressed. An indignantdeputy passed his scarf through the window of the omnibus, as an appealto the public, "et l'agita. " It is a pity that the French reader, havingno simpler word, is not in a position to understand the slight burlesque. Nay, the mere word "public, " spoken with this peculiar French good faith, has for us I know not what untransferable gravity. 

There is, in short, a general international counterchange. It isaltogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with itsextremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people should make aphrase, and another should have and enjoy it. And, in fact, there arecertain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literaryGerman whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with allseverity to be deprived. For Germans often tell you of words in theirown tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not betranslated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into saferhands. There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, abetter order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with thethought it secures, would find also their advantage. 

So with French humour. It is expressly and signally for English ears. Itis so even in the commonest farce. The unfortunate householder, forexample, who is persuaded to keep walking in the conservatory "pourretablir la circulation, " and the other who describes himself "sous-chefde bureau dans l'enregistrement, " and he who proposes to "faire hommage"of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring "employe de l'octroi"--these andall their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in their owncountry the perfection of their dulness. We only, who have thealternative of plainer and fresher words, understand it. It is not theleast of the advantages of our own dual English that we become sensibleof the mockery of certain phrases that in France have lost half theirridicule, uncontrasted. 

Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation inall Latin languages--rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, eithermajestic or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers afrequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, nolonger detects. A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellersto take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to "vegeter" fora whole hour in the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to theless practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected humourist. 

One of the phrases always used in the business of charities andsubscriptions in France has more than the intentional comedy of the farce-writer; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his visitorsin the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them: "Nous jouonscinquante centimes--les benefices seront verses integralement a lasouscription qui est ouverte a la commune pour la construction de notremaison d'ecole. "

"Fletrir, " again. Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectlycommon word of controversy. The comic dramatist is well aware of thespent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman willreply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comicdramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word ofthis kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's"fossil poetry, " would seem to be the right name for human language assome of the processes of the several recent centuries have left it. 

The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thin-S for an Englishman. They are not all, it is true, so finely comic as "Il s'est trompe dedefunte. " In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence there isenough humour, and subtle enough, for both the maker and the reader; forthe author who perceives the comedy as well as custom will permit, andfor the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger. But if notso keen as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same qualityof language. When of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor, for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on pronounces:"Il s'est empetre dans les futurs. " But for a reader who has a fullsense of the several languages that exist in English at the service ofthe several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology ofofficial France, high or low--daily France--a gratuitous and uncovenantedsmile to be had. With this the wit of the report of French literaturehas not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of circumstance makes it so. A very little ofthe mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the"sixieme et septieme arron-dissements, " in the twinkling of an eye. Sois it with the mere "domicile;" with the aid of but a little of theburlesque of life, the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal"becomes as grotesque as a phrase can make it. Even "a domicile"merely--the word of every shopman--is, in the unconscious mouths of thespeakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only anEnglishman hears it; so is the advice of the police that you shall"circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you shallnot, in the churches. 

So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale, " "maisonmortuaire, " and the still more serious "repos dominical, " "oraisondominicale. " There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspiciousgravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered at, the language offering no relief of contrast; and what is much to thecredit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, throughthis general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand authors ofcomedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar thing, and compelsthat most elaborate dulness to amuse us. _Us_, above all, by virtue ofthe custom of counterchange here set forth. 

Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the Englishpoets that so persist in France may not reveal something within theEnglish language--one would be somewhat loth to think so--reserved to theFrench reader peculiarly? Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to theselect? Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English beexplained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has hithertosatisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed toaccount for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste forpoetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, _patatras_! Who cansay?

RAIN

Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there isnothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiarrain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from theclouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey withthem by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, aninnumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricatepoints. 

The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once, being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impressionis the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. Whatwe are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy, unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things thatflash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyesof man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexperteyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzlesthem, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowlyfrom the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments arenot theirs. There seems to be such a difference of instants as investsall swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, amoment old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies. 

The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records ofour halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman'sstroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in theimpressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and thestroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded. Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; andtheir perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied bythe shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that isall our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery andbeauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that natureflashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionistto make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles uponhim, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility. 

Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, theministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that thehusbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed inthe arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the showerwithal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His senseof property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as heshoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knowsapproximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is therain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found away, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud"outweeps its rain, " and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat andto enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable. The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun'swaste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-upstreet. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, fallingunfruitfully. 

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubledbreast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as theend of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warningaway the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threatand a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alpsare hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights andbattlements of heaven. 

THE LETTERS OF MARCELINE VALMORE

"Prends garde a moi, ma fille, et couvre moi bien!" Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, writing from France to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate andchilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous, journeying fancy aswas expressed by two other women, both also Frenchwomen, and botharticulate in tenderness. Eugenie de Guerin, that queen of sisters, hadpreceded her with her own complaint, "I have a pain in my brother'sside"; and in another age Mme. De Sevigne had suffered, in the course oflong posts and through infrequent letters--a protraction of conjecturedpain--within the frame of her absent daughter. She phrased her plight inmuch the same words, confessing the uncancelled union with her child thathad effaced for her the boundaries of her personal life. 

Is not what we call a life--the personal life--a separation from theuniversal life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound? For thesewomen, such a severance was in part healed, made whole, closed up, andcured. Life was restored between two at a time of human-kind. Did thesethree women guess that their sufferings of sympathy with their childrenwere indeed the signs of a new and universal health--the prophecy ofhuman unity?

The sign might have been a more manifest and a happier prophecy had thisunion of tenderness taken the gay occasion as often as the sad. Exceptat times, in the single case of Mme. De Sevigne, all three--far moresensitive than the rest of the world--were yet not sensitive enough tofeel equally the less sharp communication of joy. They claimed, owned, and felt sensibly the pangs and not the pleasures of the absent. Or ifnot only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly in that sensewhich human anxiety and foreboding have lent to the word; they wereapprehensive of what they feared. "Are you warm?" writes MarcelineValmore to her child. "You have so little to wear--are you really warm?Oh, take care of me--cover me well. " Elsewhere she says, "You are aninsolent child to think of work. Nurse your health, and mine. Let uslive like fools"; whereby she meant that she should work with her ownfervent brain for both, and take the while her rest in Ondine. If thisliving and unshortened love was sad, it must be owned that so, too, wasthe story. Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, andMarceline was to lose this daughter and another. 

But set free from the condition and occasion of pain and sorrow, thislife without boundaries which mothers have undergone seems to suggest andto portend what the progressive charity of generations may be--and is, infact, though the continuity does not always appear--in the course of theworld. If a love and life without boundaries go down from a mother intoher child, and from that child into her children again, thenincalculable, intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions thatseem--and only seem--so to transcend the usual experience. The love ofsuch a mother passes unchanged out of her own sight. It drops down ages, but why should it alter? What in her daughter should she make so muchher own as that daughter's love for her daughter in turn? There are nolapses. 

Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created theclassic genre" in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women inwant. Some of her rich friends, she avers, seem to think that thesadness of her poems is a habit--a matter of metre and rhyme, or, atmost, that it is "temperament. " But others take up the cause of thosewhose woes, as she says, turned her long hair white too soon. Sainte-Beuve gave her his time and influence, succoured twenty politicaloffenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to her poor. "He neverhas any socks, " said his mother; "he gives them all away, like Beranger. ""He gives them with a different accent, " added the literary Marceline. 

Even when the stroller's life took her to towns she did not hate, butloved--her own Douai, where the names of the streets made her heart leap, and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux, which was, in her eyes, "rosywith the reflected colour of its animating wine"--she was taken away fromthe country of her verse. The field and the village had been dear toher, and her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing, when theycome among winds, birds, bells, and waves. They fly with the wholevolley of a summer morning. She loved the sun and her liberty, and theliberty of others. It was apparently a horror of prisons that chieflyinspired her public efforts after certain riots at Lyons had been reducedto peace. The dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote, and petitioned. She looked at the sentinels at the gates of the Lyonsgaols with such eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks. 

During her lifetime she very modestly took correction from hercontemporaries, for her study had hardly been enough for the whole art ofFrench verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine have praisedher as one of the poets of France. The later critics--from Verlaineonwards--will hold that she needs no pardon for certain slightirregularities in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for uponthis liberty they themselves have largely improved. The old rules intheir completeness seemed too much like a prison to her. She was setabout with importunate conditions--a caesura, a rhyme, narrow lodgings instrange towns, bankruptcies, salaries astray--and she took only a littlegentle liberty. 

THE HOURS OF SLEEP

There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less arethey his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically andpunctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, withoutlanguor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his daymind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest indreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind indreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because themind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of atide's, and they do return. 

In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper herinfluence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of thesleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love, contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real daypersuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity. This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to thenight, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length. 

The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and theirdominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts offhis troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state, by day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftenerin a young child's mind than "I shall endure to think of it in the day-time. " By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, notto be interchanged, and communicating together only by memory and hope. 

Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is tomiss something of the powers of a complex mind. One might imagine therhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, andtempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance andexpectancy. 

Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium, would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less would be the lossof him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence ofthe hours claimed by dreams. And as to choosing between day and night, or guessing whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the morenatural, he would be rash who should make too sure. 

In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much. That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to losethe solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleepare too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; andNature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when thelarks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and singdaybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easilydeceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to thehour. You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise andamong so many people that you shall not be aware of them; you may thusmerely force and prolong the day. But to do so is not to live well bothlives; it is not to yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and tobe cradled in the swing of change. 

There surely never was a poet but was now and then rocked in such acradle of alternate hours. "It cannot be, " says Herbert, "that I am heon whom Thy tempests fell all night. "

It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox, hasthe extremest sense of light. Almost the most shining lines in Englishpoetry--lines that cast sunrise shadows--are those of Blake, writtenconfessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, andthose dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all is as dark as hecan make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's dream of the greenplain and the river is too bright for day. So, indeed, is anotherbrightness of Blake's, which is also, in his poem, a child's dream, andwas certainly conceived by him in the hours of sleep, in which he woke towrite the Songs of Innocence:-

 O what land is the land of dreams? What are its mountains, and what are its streams? O father, I saw my mother there, Among the lilies by waters fair. Among the lambs clothed in white, She walk'd with her Thomas in sweet delight. 

To none but the hours claimed and inspired by sleep, held awake bysufferance of sleep, belongs such a vision. 

Corot also took the brilliant opportunity of the hours of sleep. In somelandscapes of his early manner he has the very light of dreams, and itwas surely because he went abroad at the time when sleep and dreamsclaimed his eyes that he was able to see so spiritual an illumination. Summer is precious for a painter, chiefly because in summer so many ofthe hours of sleep are also hours of light. He carries the mood of man'snight out into the sunshine--Corot did so--and lives the life of night, in all its genius, in the presence of a risen sun. In the only time whenthe heart can dream of light, in the night of visions, with the rhythmicpower of night at its dark noon in his mind, his eyes see the soaring ofthe actual sun. 

He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day. To thatlife belongs many another kind of work, and a sense of other kinds ofbeauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the extremeperception of the life of night. Here, at last, is the explanation ofall the memories of dreams recalled by these visionary paintings, done inearlier years than were those, better known, that are the Corots of allthe world. Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meetswith one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not ofwelcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by thespirit of the hours of sleep. 

THE HORIZON

To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter thanyourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise thehorizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up. It is like thescene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands, bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does more than bid them. He liftsthem, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of botharms; he takes them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressiveforce. Or it is as when a conductor takes his players to successiveheights of music. You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, thedistances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight. You are buta man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb thecircle of the world goes up to face you. 

Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds. This distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are on the wing, and the plain raises its verge. All things follow and wait upon youreyes. You lift these up, not by the raising of your eyelids, but by thepilgrimage of your body. "Lift thine eyes to the mountains. " It is thenthat other mountains lift themselves to your human eyes. 

It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another thatmakes the way up a hill so full of universal movement. All the landscapeis on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself closer, and its inner harboursliterally come to light; the headlands repeat themselves; little cupswithin the treeless hills open and show their farms. In the sea are manyregions. A breeze is at play for a mile or two, and the surface isturned. There are roads and curves in the blue and in the white. Not astep of your journey up the height that has not its replies in the steadymotion of land and sea. Things rise together like a flock ofmany-feathered birds. 

But it is the horizon, more than all else, you have come in search of. That is your chief companion on your way. It is to uplift the horizon tothe equality of your sight that you go high. You give it a distanceworthy of the skies. There is no distance, except the distance in thesky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the height is to be seenthe distance of this world. The line is sent back into the remoteness oflight, the verge is removed beyond verge, into a distance that isenormous and minute. 

So delicate and so slender is the distant horizon that nothing less nearthan Queen Mab and her chariot can equal its fineness. Here on the edgesof the eyelids, or there on the edges of the world--we know no otherplace for things so exquisitely made, so thin, so small and tender. Thetouches of her passing, as close as dreams, or the utmost vanishing ofthe forest or the ocean in the white light between the earth and the air;nothing else is quite so intimate and fine. The extremities of amountain view have just such tiny touches as the closeness of closed eyesshuts in. 

On the horizon is the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour mars thesimplicity of light; but there colour is effaced, not as men efface it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky disappears onthat shining edge; there is not substance enough for colour. The rim ofthe hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land, of the sea--let it only befar enough--has the same absorption of colour; and even the dark thingsdrawn upon the bright edges of the sky are lucid, the light is amongthem, and they are mingled with it. The horizon has its own way ofmaking bright the pencilled figures of forests, which are black butluminous. 

On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. Thereyou perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds--not a thunder sky--is not awall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat eachother grow smaller by distance; and you find a new unity in the sky andearth that gather alike the great lines of their designs to the samedistant close. There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up inunintelligible heights above a world that is subject to intelligibleperspective. 

Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted isthe horizon. Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not thespirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from theparks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; butrather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of theLondon smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, notwhere the soft sharp distance ought to shine. To be dull there is to putall relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless. 

A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the lineand defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormyhorizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raisethe light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray. Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer ofthe eyes. 

Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of somecompassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea. Achild on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that theycannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world. Never in thesolitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of Good Hope and CapeHorn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seenanything but a little circle of sea. The Ancient Mariner, when he wasalone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes. The sailor hasnothing but his mast, indeed. And but for his mast he would be isolatedin as small a world as that of a traveller through the plains. 

Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings. It keeps them soperpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying to flightwith flight. 

A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offinghardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear him you might thinksomething of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in thecentre of it. 

As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady, so swift, is the subsidence at your descent. The further sea lies away, hill folds down behind hill. The whole upstanding world, with its looksserene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, itssigns and communications of light, gathers down and pauses. This flockof birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth. TheCardinal weighs down the audience with his downward hands. Farewell tothe most delicate horizon. 

HABITS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Education might do somewhat to control the personal habits for whichungenerous observant men are inclined to dislike one another. It hasdone little. As to literature, this has had the most curiously diverseinfluence upon the human sensitiveness to habit. Tolstoi's perception ofhabits is keener than a child's, and he takes them uneasily, as a childdoes not. He holds them to be the occasion, if not the cause, of hatred. Anna Karenina, as she drank her coffee, knew that her sometime lover wasdreading to hear her swallow it, and was hating the crooking of herlittle finger as she held her cup. It is impossible to live in a worldof habits with such an apprehension of habits as this. 

It is no wonder that Tolstoi denies to other men unconsciousness, andeven preoccupation. With him perception never lapses, and he will notdescribe a murderer as rapt away by passion from the details of the roomand the observation of himself; nor will he represent a theologian asfailing--even while he thinks out and decides the question of hisfaith--to note the things that arrest his present and unclouded eyes. Nohabits would dare to live under those glances. They must die of dismay. 

Tolstoi sees everything that is within sight. That he sees thismultitude of things with invincible simplicity is what proves him anartist; nevertheless, for such perception as his there is no peace. Forwhen it is not the trivialities of other men's habits but the actualitiesof his own mind that he follows without rest, for him there is nopossible peace but sleep. To him, more than to all others, it has beensaid, "Watch!" There is no relapse, there is no respite but sleep ordeath. 

To such a mind every night must come with an overwhelming change, arelease too great for gratitude. What a falling to sleep! What amanumission, what an absolution! Consciousness and conscience set freefrom the exacted instant replies of the unrelapsing day. And at theawakening all is ready yet once more, and apprehension begins again: aperpetual presence of mind. 

Dr. Johnson was "absent. " No man of "absent" mind is without some hourlydeliverance. It is on the present mind that presses the burden of thepresent world. 

SHADOWS

Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, andunencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple houseis that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs ofshadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to beoffered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in avase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is betterthan a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop. 

The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into lineand intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to themind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single;it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seenagain, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shiftsthe interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing oftime, though all the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon itsimportunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, thatdo not pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure, while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours wheel. 

Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowingsouthward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in thesudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shedby a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betraysthe flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes themidsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and isabout to alight on an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, withwhich you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room, play the stealthy game of the year. 

You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs butfour candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyantjugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetricalcountercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with oneanother in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greysdarkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a"repeating pattern. "

It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration thewalls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a plaque or apicture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room oncefor all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of thedays. 

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadowswhich is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see littleexcept an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--be the day brightenough--compose the very air through which you see the light. The treesshow you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon theshining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness ofevery shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shinehave been entangled as though by some wild wind through their millionmolecules. 

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the uncloudedsun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and arethemselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day. 

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looksstill and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for so manyhours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished. Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this longsunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow. Although there maybe no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although nonoonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows andtheir life will be carried across by a brilliant bird. 

To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot seeits shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but darkenhis window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see itpluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. Whatflash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash ofdarkness?

It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. Ifhe had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's shadowwas a message from the sun. 

There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight ofthe bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This goesacross the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a whilein the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and drygrass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch andclings. 

In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, aboutHoly Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are themovement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to makea shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-whitesea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs isalways a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go allways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northernfields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high thatthough they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have thelight of the earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them, and they fly between lights. 

Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift asdreams, " at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, andledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside bydegrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries untilthere comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadowsclose, complete. 

The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have tracedwild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows havefled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movementof her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earththat carries her clasped shadow from the sun. 

Footnotes:

{1} I found it afterwards: it was Rebecca.