Part 22
It seems wicked to travesty Wordsworth’s tender little poem, but Leigh’s verses amused us greatly when they appeared. Mark Akenside (1721-1770) is a poet now almost forgotten.
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The hour, which might have been, yet might not be, Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore Yet whereof life was barren,—on what shore Bides it the breaking of Time’s weary sea?
D. G. ROSSETTI (_Stillborn Love_).
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Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in those far-off days which live in us, and transform our perception into love.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Mill on the Floss_).
The firmaments of daisies since to me Have had those mornings in their opening eyes; The bunched cowslip’s pale transparency Carries that sunshine of sweet memories, And wild-rose branches take their finest scent From those blest hours of infantine content.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother and Sister_).
It will be observed that the thought is the same in both passages.
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Get thee behind the man I am now, You man that I used to be.
R. BROWNING (_Martin Relph_).
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For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
R. L. STEVENSON (_Across the Plains_).
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I always wanted to make a clean breast of it; And now it is made—why, my heart’s blood, that went trickle, Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets, Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle, And genially floats me about the giblets.
R. BROWNING (_The Flight of the Duchess_).
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A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
ALEXANDER POPE.
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We have all of us considerable regard for our past self, and are not fond of casting reflections on that respected individual by a total negation of his opinions.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Scenes from Clerical Life_).
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SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH
Say not, the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main;
And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes; comes in the light; In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright!
A. H. CLOUGH.
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The gravest fish is an oyster, The gravest bird is an owl, The gravest beast is a donkey, And the gravest man is a fool.
SCOTCH PROVERB.
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... Fear No petty customs nor appearances; But think what others only dreamed about; And say what others did but think; and do What others did but say; and glory in What others dared but do.
PHILIP J. BAILEY (_My Lady_).
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The Cynic in society becomes the Pessimist in religion. The large embrace of sympathy, which fails him as interpreter of human life, will no less be wanting when he reads the meaning of the universe. The harmony of the great whole escapes him in his hunt for little discords here and there. He is blind to the august balance of nature, in his preoccupation with some creaking show of defect. He misses the comprehensive march of advancing purpose, because while he himself is in it, he has found some halting member that seems to lag behind. He picks holes in the universal order; he winds through its tracks as a detective, and makes scandals of all that is not to his mind; trusts nothing that he cannot see: and he sees chiefly the exceptional, the dubious, the harsh. The glory of the midnight heavens affects him not, for thinking of a shattered planet or the uninhabitable moon. He makes more of the flood which sweeps the crop away, than of the perpetual river that feeds it year by year. For him the purple bloom upon the hills, peering through the young green woods, does but dress up a stony desert with deceitful beauty; and in the new birth of summer, he cannot yield himself to the exuberance of glad existence for wonder why insects tease and nettles sting. Nothing is so fair, nothing so imposing, as to beguile him into faith and hope.... In selfish minds the same temper resorts to the pettiest reasons for the most desolating thoughts: “If God were good, why should I be born with a club-foot? If the world were justly governed how could my merits be so long overlooked?”
J. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, I, 97).
Reverting to this subject later, Martineau says (_Hours of Thought II._, 354) “Wherever he moves, he empties the space around him of its purest elements; with his low thought he roofs it over from the heavenly light and the sweet air; and then complains of the world as a close-breathed and stifling place.”
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Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.
GEORGE MEREDITH (_The Egoist_).
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And there’s none of them, but would as soon Criticize the Almighty as not, And see that the angels kept tune And watch that the sun and the moon Did not squander the light they have got.
W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).
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Love, that is first and last of all things made, The light that has the living world for shade, The spirit that for temporal veil has on The souls of all men woven in unison, One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought And lights of sunny and starry deed and thought ... Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime; Love, that is blood within the veins of time.... Love, that sounds loud or light in all men’s ears, Whence all men’s eyes take fire from sparks of tears, That binds on all men’s feet or chains or wings; Love, that is root and fruit of terrene things; Love, that the whole world’s waters shall not drown, The whole world’s fiery forces not burn down; Love, that what time his own hands guard his head The whole world’s wrath and strength shall not strike dead; Love, that if once his own hands make his grave The whole world’s pity and sorrow shall not save ... Love that is fire within thee and light above, And lives by grace of nothing but of love.
SWINBURNE (_Tristram of Lyonesse_).
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My tantalized spirit Here blandly reposes, Forgetting, or never Regretting, its roses.
E. A. POE (_For Annie_).
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Now, for myself, when once the wick is crushed, I ask not where the light is, which is not, Nor where the music, when the harp is hushed, Nor where the memory, which is clean forgot.
W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).
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Goethe says somewhere there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would hate him. I would prefer to say that there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would _love_ him.
R. HODGSON (_Letter_).
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For us no shadow on life’s solemn dial Goes back to give us peace; There is no resting-place in the stern trial Until the heart-throbs cease; We cannot hold Time fast, and bid him bless us, And not for us the sun, When shades fall fast, and doubts and woes oppress us, Stands still in Gibeon.
E. H. SEARS.
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Here’s my case. Of old I used to love him This same unseen friend, before I knew: Dream there was none like him, none above him,— Wake to hope and trust my dream was true....
All my days, I’ll go the softlier, sadlier, For that dream’s sake! How forget the thrill Through and through me as I thought “The gladlier Lives my friend because I love him still!”
R. BROWNING (_Fears and Scruples_).
The “Friend” is God. The lines “All my days, I’ll go the softlier, sadlier, For that dream’s sake,” seem to me very beautiful. In so few words Browning, with dramatic insight, expresses the feeling of a Renan or George Eliot after they had lost their faith in Christianity.
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The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow....
In proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the colour of their present thought to all nature and all art.... The great man makes the great thing.... Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
EMERSON (_The American Scholar_).
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Cantat Deo, qui vivit Deo.
(He sings to God, who lives to God.)
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
Jenny Lind used to say, “I sing to God.”
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A CONSERVATIVE
The garden beds I wandered by One bright and cheerful morn, When I found a new-fledged butterfly, A-sitting on a thorn, A black and crimson butterfly, All doleful and forlorn.
I thought that life could have no sting To infant butterflies, So I gazed on this unhappy thing With wonder and surprise, While sadly with his waving wing He wiped his weeping eyes.
Said I, “What can the matter be? Why weepest thou so sore, With garden fair and sunlight free And flowers in goodly store?”— But he only turned away from me And burst into a roar.
Cried he, “My legs are thin and few Where once I had a swarm! Soft fuzzy fur—a joy to view— Once kept my body warm, Before these flapping wing-things grew, To hamper and deform!”
At that outrageous bug I shot The fury of mine eye; Said I, in scorn all burning hot, In rage and anger high, “You ignominious idiot! Those wings are made to fly!”
“I do not want to fly,” said he, “I only want to squirm!” And he dropped his wings dejectedly, But still his voice was firm: “I do not want to be a fly! I want to be a worm!”
O yesterday of unknown lack! To-day of unknown bliss! I left my fool in red and black, The last I saw was this,— The creature madly climbing back Into his chrysalis.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON.
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The very fiends weave ropes of sand Rather than taste pure hell in idleness.
R. BROWNING (_A Forgiveness_).
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He had formed several ingenious plans by which he meant to circumvent people of large fortune and small capacity; but then he never met with exactly the right people under exactly the right circumstances.... It is possible to pass a great many bad half-pennies and bad half-crowns, but I believe there has no instance been known of passing a half-penny or a half-crown for a sovereign.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother Jacob_).
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In the old times Death was a feverish sleep, In which men walked. The other world was cold And thinly-peopled, so life’s emigrants Came back to mingle with the crowds of earth: But now great cities are transplanted thither, Memphis, and Babylon, and either Thebes, And Priam’s towery town with its one beech. The dead are most and merriest: so be sure There will be no more haunting, till their towns Are full to the garret; then they’ll shut their gates, To keep the living out, and perhaps leave A dead or two between both kingdoms.
T. L. BEDDOES (_Death’s Jest-Book_, III, 3).
This is one of the queer fancies in a curious poem.
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Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.
EMERSON (_Essay on Experience_).
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De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus.
(We make for ourselves a ladder of our vices, when we tread under foot the vices themselves.)
ST. AUGUSTINE (_De Ascensione_).
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I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.
TENNYSON (_In Memoriam_).
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Saint Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
LONGFELLOW (_The Ladder of St. Augustine_).
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The trials that beset you, The sorrows ye endure, The manifold temptations That death alone can cure,
What are they but His jewels Of right celestial worth? What are they but the ladder Set up to Heav’n on earth?
J. M. NEALE (_O Happy Band of Pilgrims_).
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I can bear it no longer—this diabolical invention of gentility, which kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed! Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie, and should be flung into the fire. Organize rank and precedence! That was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward, some great marshal, and organize Equality in society.
THACKERAY (_Book of Snobs_).
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Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; At the devil’s booth are all things sold, Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold; For a cap and bells our lives we pay, Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking: ’Tis heaven alone that is given away, ’Tis only God may be had for the asking.
J. R. LOWELL (_The Vision of Sir Launfal_).
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... The too susceptible Tupman, who, to the wisdom and experience of maturer years, superadded the enthusiasm and ardour of a boy, in the most interesting and pardonable of human weaknesses, love. Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it disappeared from within the range of Tupman’s vision; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon the borders of the white cravat; but the soul of Tupman had known no change.
CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).
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The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the _savants_ in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every man’s road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings. Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference; and marriage a parricide.
ALEXANDER SMITH (_The Importance of a Man to Himself_).
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I think sometimes how good it were had I some one by me to listen when I am tempted to read a passage aloud. Yes, but is there any mortal in the whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for sympathetic understanding—nay, who would even generally be at one with me in my appreciation? Such harmony of intelligences is the rarest thing. All through life we long for it ... and, after all, we learn that the vision is illusory. To every man is it decreed: Thou shalt live alone.
GEORGE GISSING (_The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_).
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ISOLATION
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live _alone_. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights, And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, on starry nights, The nightingales divinely sing; And lovely notes, from shore to shore, Across the sounds and channels pour—
Oh! then a longing like despair Is to their farthest caverns sent; For surely once, they feel, we were Parts of a single continent! Now round us spreads the watery plain— Oh might our marges meet again!
Who ordered, that their longing’s fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled? Who renders vain their deep desire? A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
This fine poem is one of a series called “Switzerland,” which was written as the result of Arnold’s meeting and falling in love with a lady at Berne. The poem immediately preceding it in the series is entitled “Isolation: To Marguerite,” while this is called “To Marguerite, Continued” but as it is now quoted separately, it is better entitled “Isolation.”
In the preceding poems the lady has lost her affection while her lover is still devoted; and this leads to the subject of our isolation from each other in our inner lives. In the second verse the poet describes the moments when we most crave for love, sympathy, and mutual spiritual understanding and union.
For an interesting fact connected with this poem, see next quotation and note.
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(Thackeray has been describing how husband, wife, mother, son—each of the inmates of a household—is interested in his or her own separate world and looking at the same things from a different point of view.) How lonely we are in the world! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united: pshaw! does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache?... As for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, Do you tell _her_ all? Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.
THACKERAY (_Pendennis_, ch. XVI).
The similarity between this passage and the preceding poem, written at about the same time, is very curious. Arnold’s poem appeared in 1852 but was composed ten years earlier, while _Pendennis_ was published in monthly parts in 1849-50. Therefore, neither author would consciously know at the time what the other had written.
The incident is probably an illustration of the mysterious way in which minds influence one another and create the spirit of the particular age. There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb to the effect that we are more the product of our age than of our parents. This permeating quality of thought and feeling is, no doubt, the explanation why the highest art and literature, though often unappreciated at the time, become ultimately recognized. It appears not to be sufficiently taken into account in other directions. For instance, it is repeatedly stated that Blake, because of the limited circulation of his poems, exercised _no_ influence on the Romantic Revival—see for example _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. XI, 201. Yet we know that his work was known to and appreciated by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Hayley. (Although little regarded now, Hayley’s fame was then so great that he was offered and refused the poet-laureateship. He appears to be the one man who was an intimate friend of both Blake and Cowper.) While a very long period went by before Blake’s poems became generally known, their influence may well have been very great, permeating unconsciously through other minds. See reference on p. 194 to the similar case of Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam.”
Even if a poem were read by _only one person_, it might conceivably influence a generation of authors. Suppose, if that had been possible, a page of Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse” or F. W. H. Myers’ “Implicit Promise” (both quoted elsewhere) had been read by Pope or Dryden; how the monotonous heroic couplet of their time might have been transformed!
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A child was playing on a summer strand That fringed the wavelets of a sunny sea; The mother looked in love. “Now build,” said she, “Your splendid golden castles where you stand; But when the wave has beaten all to sand, You must go home.” “Ah, not so soon,” said he.
And now the night has darkened out his glee, And sad-eyed Grief has grasped him by the hand. No more the years shall find him free and wild And madly merry as a bright brave bird: For earth has nothing like the home he craves And pauseless Time is beating bitter waves On all his palaces. He waits the word Away beyond the blue, “Come home, my child.”
R. HODGSON, 1879.
An impromptu written when the mother and child incident happened and not revised.
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