Part 3

It was now absolutely becoming night. Their terrors increased greatly. They shouted and cried aloud, in the hope of making their parents hear them. They felt sure that both father and mother must be come home; and as sure that they would be hunting for them. But they did not reflect that their parents could not tell in what direction they had gone. Both father and mother were come home, and the mother had instantly rushed out to try to find them, on perceiving that they were not in the house. She had hurried to and fro, and called—not at first supposing they would be far. But when she heard nothing of them, she ran in, and begged of her husband to join in the search. But at first David Dunster would do nothing. He was angry at them for going away from the house, and said he was too tired to go on a wild-goose chase through the plantations after them. ‘They are i’ th’ plantations,’ said he; ‘they are sheltering there somewhere. Let them alone, and they’ll come home, with a good long tail behind them.’

With this piece of a child’s song of sheep, David sat down to his supper, and Betty Dunster hurried up the valley, shouting—‘Children, where are you? David! Jane! Nancy! where are you?’

When she heard nothing of them, she hurried still more wildly up the hill towards the village. When she arrived there—the distance of a mile—she inquired from house to house, but no one had seen anything of them. It was clear they had not been in that direction. An alarm was thus created in the village; and several young men set out to join Mrs. Dunster in the quest. They again descended the valley towards Dunster’s house, shouting every now and then, and listening. The night was pitch dark, and the rain fell heavily; but the wind had considerably abated, and once they thought they heard a faint cry in answer to their call, far down the valley. They were right; the children had heard the shouting, and had replied to it. But they were far off. The young men shouted again, but there was no answer; and after shouting once more without success, they hastened on. When they reached David Dunster’s house, they found the door open, and no one within. They knew that David had set off in quest of the children himself, and they determined to descend the valley. The distracted mother went with them, crying silently to herself, and praying inwardly, and every now and then trying to shout. But the young men raised their strong voices above hers, and made the cliffs echo with their appeals.

Anon a voice answered them down the valley. They ran on as well as the darkness would let them, and soon found that it was David Dunster, who had been in the plantations on the other side of the valley; but hearing nothing of the lost children, now joined them. He said he had heard the cry from the hill side farther down, that answered to their shouts; and he was sure that it was his boy David’s voice. But he had shouted again, and there had been no answer but a wild scream as of terror, that made his blood run cold.

‘O God!’ exclaimed the distracted mother, ‘what can it be? David! David! Jane! Nancy!’

There was no answer. The young men bade Betty Dunster to contain herself, and they would find the children before they went home again. All held on down the valley, and in the direction whence the voice came. Many times did the young men and the now strongly agitated father shout and listen. At length they seemed to hear voices of weeping and moaning. They listened—they were sure they heard a lamenting—it could only be the children. But why then did they not answer? On struggled the men, and Mrs. Dunster followed wildly after. Now, again, they stood and shouted, and a kind of terrified scream followed the shout.

‘God in heaven!’ exclaimed the mother; ‘what is it? There is something dreadful. My children! my children! where are you?’

‘Be silent, pray do, Mrs. Dunster,’ said one of the young men, ‘or we cannot catch the sounds so as to follow them.’ They again listened, and the wailings of the children were plainly heard. The whole party pushed forward over stock and stone up the hill. They called again, and there was a cry of ‘Here! here! fayther! mother! where are you?’

In a few moments more the whole party had reached the children, who stood drenched with rain, and trembling violently, under a cliff that gave no shelter, but was exposed especially to the wind and rain.

‘O Christ! My children!’ cried the mother wildly, struggling forwards and clasping one in her arms. ‘Nancy! Jane! But where is David? David! David! Oh, where is David? Where is your brother?’

The whole party was startled at not seeing the boy, and joined in a simultaneous ‘Where is he? Where is your brother?’

The two children only wept and trembled more violently, and burst into loud crying.

‘Silence!’ shouted the father. ‘Where is David, I tell ye? Is he lost? David, lad, where ar ta?’

All listened, but there was no answer but the renewed crying of the two girls.

‘Where is the lad, then?’ thundered forth the father with a terrible oath.

The two terrified children cried, ‘Oh, down there! down there!’

‘Down where? Oh God!’ exclaimed one of the young men; ‘why it’s a precipice! Down there?’

At this dreadful intelligence the mother gave a wild shriek, and fell senseless on the ground. The young men caught her, and dragged her back from the edge of the precipice. The father in the same moment, furious at what he heard, seized the younger child that happened to be near him, and shaking it violently, swore he would fling it down after the lad.

He was angry with the poor children, as if they had caused the destruction of his boy. The young men seized him, and bade him think what he was about; but the man believing his boy had fallen down the precipice, was like a madman. He kicked at his wife as she lay on the ground, as if she were guilty of this calamity by leaving the children at home. He was furious against the poor girls, as if they had led their brother into danger. In his violent rage he was a perfect maniac, and the young men pushing him away, cried shame on him. In a while, the desperate man torn by a hurricane of passion, sate himself down on a crag, and burst into a tempest of tears, and struck his head violently with his clenched fists, and cursed himself and everybody. It was a dreadful scene.

Meantime, some of the young men had gone down below the precipice on which the children had stood, and, feeling amongst the loose stones, had found the body of poor little David. He was truly dead!

When he had heard the shout of his father, or of the young men, he had given one loud shout in answer, and saying ‘Come on! never fear now!’ sprang forward, and was over the precipice in the dark, and flew down and was dashed to pieces. His sisters heard a rush, a faint shriek, and suddenly stopping, escaped the destruction that poor David had found.

NEW LIFE AND OLD LEARNING.

There is not, in the whole of Bacon’s writings, a remark more profoundly characteristic of the man and his philosophy, than is embodied in his epigram that Antiquity is the Youth of the World. If men could only have had the courage to act upon this truth as soon as it was pointed out,—if they could but have seen, that, in their mode of reckoning antiquity, they made always the mistake of beginning the calculations from the wrong end, and that, in everything relating to the progress of knowledge, and the advancement of the species, the Present, not the Past, should be deemed of superior authority,—how many miseries society would have spared itself, and how much earlier it would have profited by the greatest of its teachers, Experience!

‘For antiquity,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘the opinion which men cherish concerning it is altogether negligent, and scarcely congruous even to the name. For the old age and grandevity of the world are to be truly counted as antiquity; which are properly to be ascribed to our times, not to the younger age of the world, such as it was with the ancients. Since that age, in respect to us indeed, is ancient and greater; but in respect to the world itself, was new and lesser. And in reality, as we look for a greater acquaintance with human affairs, and a more mature judgment, from an old than from a young man, on account of his experience, and the variety and abundance of the things which he has seen, and heard, and considered, just so it is fit also that much greater things be expected from our age (if it knew its strength, and would endeavour and apply) than from the old times; as being a more advanced age of the world, and enlarged and accumulate with numberless experiences and observations.’

Have these pregnant sentences lost their meaning in the two centuries and a half that have since rolled away? Let us take the wealthiest and most distinguished seminary of learning now existing in England, and judge.

At the commencement of the present century, when the Novum Organum had been written nearly two hundred years, the examinations at the University of Oxford, so far as they were scientific at all, and not restricted to learned languages, turned entirely on the scholastic logic which the Novum Organum had shown to be a foul obstruction to knowledge. The new and true logic, as explained by Bacon, was never mentioned in the venerable place; and the new discoveries of the laws of nature to which it had led, formed no part of the general course of study, or of the subjects of public examination. It was quite possible for an Oxford man to have brought away a distinguished degree in the sciences, without knowing the truths of universal gravitation, or of the celestial motions, or of the planetary forces, or of any one of the provisions made by nature for the stability of the system we inhabit; and the very highest Oxford degree in the non-scientific departments, did not imply, any more than it does even yet, the remotest knowledge of modern languages or literature, of modern history or philosophy, of whether it might not have been Cromwell who discovered America, or Columbus who fought at Marston Moor. For any interest that the students at Oxford University were required to take in such matters, the past three hundred years might never have existed, or have been utterly annihilated, and all their wondrous burden of experiences melted into air.

It was not till after the nineteenth century had begun, that some sense of what had been going on in the world outside crept into the cloisters at Oxford. Statutes were then passed to recognise the Newtonian improvements in philosophy, and recommending, though not necessitating, their adoption into the course for honours. Honours nevertheless continued to be taken without them; and it is notorious that the soil has been ungenial to their growth, and that they never have flourished in it. Oxford, in effect, continued up to this day no other than it was four centuries ago. Apart from the doubtful discipline of life and manners attainable within its walls, it is still no more than a huge theological school, where the lay youth of England are admitted to participate in such meagre allowance of intellectual training as the clergy think safe for themselves; where Manchester and Birmingham are ignored; where the Greek and Latin authors continue in the same esteem as when they actually contained whatever existed of learning left upon the earth, and no education could proceed without them; and from which there issue into the world yearly reinforcements of the upper classes of society, less able to cope with the wants and duties that surround them, and less acquainted with the laws and operations by which the present is to be guided into the future, than any self-taught merchant’s clerk at Liverpool, or any sharp engineer’s lad at the railway in Euston Square.

Now, what has been the answer from Oxford when reproaches of this kind have been addressed to it? What was its answer when ridiculed, forty years ago, for teaching what rational men had been laughing at for more than a century? It amounted to this—that so intimately had the original statutes of the University interwoven the Aristotelian methods with the whole course of its studies and exercises, and so sacredly were its officers bound to see to the enforcement of those statutes, that the last stronghold from which any such learning could be dislodged was the University, to which its mere forms and practices unhappily continued to be essential, even long after every vestige of reality had vanished out of them. In other words it was confessed that Oxford had been so constructed as a place of study, that the rules and statutes which should have been framed for the reception of truth, in whatever quarter it might appear, had turned out to be only available for the retention and perpetuation of error; and that Education, whose express province everywhere else was to absorb and make profit of every new acquisition, was miserably bound, on this spot only, to reject them all. Precisely the same arguments have very lately been repeated. When the great ‘whip’ of the country parsons brought up a majority against the Modern History statute twelve months ago, this was the plea on which bigotry rallied her forces; and when more recently the statute was again proposed, the same plea would have secured it the same reception, if the old flock of reverend Thwack-’ums had not meanwhile tired of the expense and trouble of being dragged in a drove from their parsonages to the Senate House, to bleat forth ignorant _non placets_.

As it was, the History statute was passed with its notable limitation against the events of the last sixty years. The Oxford scholar may now sail down the stream of modern story as long as the water is smooth, or the storm seen only in the distance; but as he nears the explosive point of 1789, of which the vast and terrible wrecks are still tumbling around us, a huge board warns him of ‘danger,’ and his frail little cock-boat of history is driven forcibly all the way back again. Such is the point of advance to which the present year of our Lord has brought the University of Oxford. Such is the provision made at the wealthiest place of education in the world, in the middle of the nineteenth century, for that true and subtle understanding of modern life and institutions on which the peaceful development of the twentieth century will mainly depend! But Oxford was founded by a Church, which, amid all ludicrous surrounding evidences of her failures and her follies, still claims to be infallible; and the worst peculiarities of the founder cleave to the foundation. The next fifty years will have to show, however, whether an institution shall be allowed to continue in the annual disposal of some half million or more of money for a purpose she so manifestly mistakes, that even the learning she prefers to every other is less taught to her scholars for the wisdom to be found in it, than for mere constructive skill in the language by which that wisdom is conveyed.

Sydney Smith has remarked it as one of the great advantages of the classical education in which we are trained in this country, that it sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity in thought. ‘It is impossible for us,’ he exclaims, in one of those noble lectures on moral philosophy of which the fragments have recently been published, ‘in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully related, without catching, _ourselves_, some taste for greatness, and a love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things than other men. And though the state of order and discipline into which the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice; the noblest incitement to love truth and manly independence and honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the system of life upon the rock of integrity.’

But is the opportunity fairly afforded for this? Is not the attention which ought to be fixed upon Things, to secure any part of the gain thus eloquently set before us, for the most part distracted and occupied by Words, in the system which commonly prevails? Has not the labour to be undergone in obtaining the ready verbal skill exacted in College examinations, a direct tendency to weaken our pleasure in the history, philosophy, or poetry on which we grind and sharpen that verbal skill? We apprehend that this is really the case; and that the old learning which Oxford persists in thinking all-sufficient for the wants of our new and busy life, is taught upon a method which strips it of its noblest lessons, and withers its choicest fruit.

The question is a most serious one for those whom it most immediately concerns, and whom it should warn of the danger of too manifestly lagging behind the time. At this moment power is changing hands, as certainly as in the days of those subtle and eager men who seated the ancient learning on its throne; and who would as surely depose it now, if founding new universities amongst us, and give it but its due and proper place in the expanding circles of knowledge, as, four hundred years ago, they admitted its just predominance, and established its solitary sway. When periods of such vicissitude arrive, it is for those who have been powerful heretofore, to look to their tenures of authority. Upon nothing can they hope to rest, if not upon complete accordance with the spirit of the age, and a thorough aptitude to its necessities and wants. If the education of children is to continue imperfect and bad, as Dean Swift tells us he had found it always in his experience, in exact proportion to the wealth and grandeur of the parents, the next generation of parents will have to look to the continued security of their wealth and grandeur. The Earth is in incessant motion. The time when it was supposed to be permanently fixed in the centre of the universe has passed away for ever, and modes of study only suited to that time will have to share the fate that has befallen it.

THE RAILWAY STATION.

They judge not well, who deem that once among us A spirit moved that now from earth has fled; Who say that at the busy sounds which throng us, Its shining wings for ever more have sped.

Not all the turmoil of the Age of Iron Can scare that Spirit hence; like some sweet bird That loud harsh voices in its cage environ, It sings above them all, and will be heard!

Not, for the noise of axes or of hammers, Will that sweet bird forsake her chosen nest; Her warblings pierce through all those deafening clamours But surer to their echoes in the breast.

And not the Past alone, with all its guerdon Of twilight sounds and shadows, bids them rise; But soft, above the noontide heat and burden Of the stern present, float those melodies.

Not with the baron bold, the minstrel tender, Not with the ringing sound of shield and lance, Not with the Field of Gold in all its splendour, Died out the generous flame of old Romance.

Still, on a nobler strife than tilt or tourney, Rides forth the errant knight, with brow elate; Still patient pilgrims take, in hope, their journey; Still meek and cloistered spirits ‘stand and wait.’

Still hath the living, moving, world around us, Its legends, fair with honour, bright with truth; Still, as in tales that in our childhood bound us, Love holds the fond traditions of its youth.

We need not linger o’er the fading traces Of lost divinities; or seek to hold Their serious converse ’mid Earth’s green waste-places, Or by her lonely fountains, as of old:

For, far remote from Nature’s fair creations, Within the busy mart, the crowded street, With sudden, sweet, unlooked-for revelations Of a bright presence we may chance to meet;

E’en _now_, beside a restless tide’s commotion, I stand and hear, in broken music swell, Above the ebb and flow of Life’s great ocean, An under-song of greeting and farewell.

For here are meetings: moments that inherit The hopes and wishes, that through months and years Have held such anxious converse with the spirit, That now its joy can only speak in tears;

And here are partings: hands that soon must sever, Yet clasp the firmer; heart, that unto heart, Was ne’er so closely bound before, nor ever So near the other as when now they part;

And here Time holds his steady pace unbroken, For all that crowds within his narrow scope; For all the language, uttered and unspoken, That will return when Memory comforts Hope!

One short and hurried moment, and for ever Flies, like a dream, its sweetness and its pain; And, for the hearts that love, the hands that sever, Who knows what meetings are in store again?

They who are left, unto their homes returning, With musing step, trace o’er each by-gone scene; And they upon their journey—doth no yearning, No backward glance, revert to what hath been?

Yes! for awhile, perchance, a tear-drop starting, Dims the bright scenes that greet the eye and mind; But here—as ever in life’s cup of parting— Theirs is the bitterness who stay behind!

So in life’s sternest, last farewell, may waken A yearning thought, a backward glance be thrown By them who leave: but oh! how blest the token, To those who stay behind when THEY are gone!

THE BROWN HAT.

‘My son,’ said the wisest of modern men—whose name, of course, it were malicious to mention, and foolish also, the object being to promulgate charity, not to excite rancour—‘My son, if you would go through life easily, I can give you no better rule of conduct than this: _Never wear a brown hat in Friesland_.’

Now, though this piece of counsel may sound as hieroglyphical and mysterious as the well known precept by _Mr. Malaprop_ administered to his offspring, when the latter was about to quit home, ‘Evil communication is worth two in the bush,’ it is nevertheless susceptible of the clearest and most explicit interpretation. Though the fruits of particular and personal experience, it may be applied to every man who wears a hat under the sun, the moon, the seven stars, or the Seven Dials! let alone the Seven United Provinces!