Part 5

_Edinburgh, May 11._--Charlotte was unable to take leave of me, being in a sound sleep, after a very indifferent night. Perhaps it was as well. Emotion might have hurt her; and nothing I could have exprest would have been worth the risk. I have foreseen, for two years and more, that this menaced event could not be far distant. I have seen plainly, within the last two months, that recovery was hopeless. And yet to part with the companion of twenty-nine years when so very ill--that I did not, could not foresee. It withers my heart to think of it, and to recollect that I can hardly hope again to seek confidence and counsel from that ear to which all might be safely confided. But in her present lethargic state, what would my attentions have availed? and Anne has promised close and constant intelligence. I must dine with James Ballantyne to-day _en famille_. I can not help it; but would rather be at home and alone. However, I can go out too. I will not yield to the barren sense of hopelessness which struggles to invade me. I past a pleasant day with J. B.,[14] which was a great relief from the black dog which would have worried me at home. We were quite alone.

_May 15._--Received the melancholy intelligence that all is over at Abbotsford.

_Abbotsford, May 16._--She died at nine in the morning, after being very ill for two days--easy at last.

I arrived here late last night. Anne is worn out, and has had hysterics, which returned on my arrival. Her broken accents were like those of a child, the language, as well as the tones, broken, but in the most gentle voice of submission. "Poor mama--never return again--gone forever--a better place." Then, when she came to herself, she spoke with sense, freedom, and strength of mind, till her weakness returned. It would have been inexpressibly moving to me as a stranger--what was it then to the father and the husband? For myself, I scarce know how I feel, sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock, sometimes as weak as the wave that breaks on it.

I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet, when I contrast what this place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family--all but poor Anne, an impoverished and embarrassed man, I am deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone. Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.

I have seen her. The figure I beheld is, and is not, my Charlotte--my thirty years' companion. There is the same symmetry of form, tho those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic--but that yellow mask, with pinched features, which seem to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression? I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little changed, because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances of sickness and pain. Mine go back to a period of comparative health. If I write long in this way, I shall write down my resolution, which I should rather write up, if I could. I wonder how I shall do with the large portion of thoughts which were hers for thirty years. I suspect they will be hers yet for a long time at least. But I will not blaze cambric and crape in the public eye like a disconsolate widower, that most affected of all characters.

_May 18._--Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again opens on us; the air is soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering. They can not refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere--somehow; _where_ we can not tell; _how_ we can not tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me. The necessity of this separation--that necessity which rendered it even a relief--that and patience must be my comfort. I do not experience those paroxysms of grief which others do on the same occasion. I can exert myself and speak even cheerfully with the poor girls. But alone, or if anything touches me--the choking sensation. I have been to her room: there was no voice in it--no stirring; the pressure of the coffin was visible on the bed, but it had been removed elsewhere; all was neat as she loved it, but all was calm--calm as death. I remembered the last sight of her; she raised herself in bed, and tried to turn her eyes after me, and said, with a sort of smile, "You all have such melancholy faces." They were the last words I ever heard her utter, and I hurried away, for she did not seem quite conscious of what she said. When I returned, immediately (before) departing, she was in a deep sleep. It is deeper now. This was but seven days since.

They are arranging the chamber of death; that which was long the apartment of connubial happiness, and of whose arrangements (better than in richer houses) she was so proud. They are treading fast and thick. For weeks you could have heard a foot-fall. Oh, my God!

_May 21._--Our sad preparations for to-morrow continue. A letter from Lockhart; doubtful if Sophia's health or his own state of business will let him be here. If things permit he comes tonight. From Charles not a word; but I think I may expect him. I wish to-morrow were over; not that I fear it, for my nerves are pretty good, but it will be a day of many recollections.

_May 22._--Charles arrived last night, much affected of course. Anne had a return of her fainting-fits on seeing him, and again upon seeing Mr. Ramsay, the gentleman who performs the service. I heard him do so with the utmost propriety for my late friend, Lady Alvanley, the arrangement of whose funeral devolved upon me. How little I could guess when, where, and with respect to whom I should next hear those solemn words. Well, I am not apt to shrink from that which is my duty, merely because it is painful; but I wish this day over. A kind of cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem to be doing and talking about.

_May 23._--About an hour before the mournful ceremony of yesterday, Walter arrived, having traveled express from Ireland on receiving the news. He was much affected, poor fellow, and no wonder. Poor Charlotte nursed him, and perhaps for that reason she was ever partial to him. The whole scene floats as a sort of dream before me--the beautiful day, the gray ruins covered and hidden among clouds of foliage and flourish, where the grave, even in the lap of beauty, lay lurking and gaped for its prey. Then the grave looks, the hasty important bustle of men with spades and mattocks--the train of carriages--the coffin containing the creature that was so long the dearest on earth to me, and whom I was to consign to the very spot which in pleasure-parties we so frequently visited. It seems still as if this could not be really so. But it is so--and duty to God and to my children must teach me patience.

_May 24._--Slept wretchedly, or rather waked wretchedly, all night, and was very sick and bilious in consequence, and scarce able to hold up my head with pain. A walk, however, with my sons did me a great deal of good; indeed their society is the greatest support the world can afford me. Their ideas of everything are so just and honorable, kind toward their sisters, and affectionate to me, that I must be grateful to God for sparing them to me, and continue to battle with the world for their sakes, if not for my own.

_May 26._--Were an enemy coming upon my house, would I not do my best to fight, altho opprest in spirits; and shall a similar despondency prevent me from mental exertion? It shall not, by Heaven!

_May 30._--This has been a melancholy day--most melancholy. I am afraid poor Charles found me weeping. I do not know what other folks feel, but with me the hysterical passion that impels tears is a terrible violence--a sort of throttling sensation--then succeeded by a state of dreaming stupidity, in which I ask if my poor Charlotte can actually be dead.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: From Chapter XXXIII of "The Bride of Lammermoor."]

[Footnote 8: From Chapter LV of "Guy Mannering."]

[Footnote 9: From Chapter XXIII of "Rob Roy." Scott's celebrated character was a real person, his name being Robert MacGregor, or, as he chose to call himself, Robert Campbell. He was born in 1671 and died in 1734, and was a son of Donald MacGregor, a lieutenant in the army of James II, from whom after the accession of William of Orange, Robert obtained a commission. Afterward he became a freebooter. He was included in the Act of Attainder, but continued to levy blackmail on the gentry of Scotland while in the enjoyment of the protection of the Duke of Argyle.]

[Footnote 10: From "Kenilworth," which in general is founded on actual occurrences, altho there are many incongruities in the story as to time and circumstances. Queen Elizabeth's actual visit to Kenilworth took place in 1575. The castle is now one of the most picturesque ruins in England. It was dismantled under Cromwell.]

[Footnote 11: Kenilworth, which dates from 1120, was long a royal residence. Here in 1327 Edward III was imprisoned. It was afterward granted to John of Gaunt, "time-honored Lancaster," and in 1562 to the Earl of Leicester.]

[Footnote 12: From "The Journal." Lady Scott died in the midst of Scott's financial misfortunes. She was Charlotte Mary Carpenter, daughter of a French refugee, Jean Charpentier.]

[Footnote 13: The "Life of Napoleon."]

[Footnote 14: James Ballantyne was the printer of Scott's books and his partner in the firm of James Ballantyne & Co., which failed in 1826, in consequence of being involved in the bankruptcy of the publishing house of Constable & Co., with which also Scott was connected.]

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Born in 1772, died in 1834; educated at Cambridge, but was not graduated; formed an unsuccessful scheme for a communistic settlement on the Susquehanna River, in Pennsylvania; married a sister of Southey's wife in 1795; published at Bristol a volume of poems in 1796; "The Ancient Mariner" in 1798; settled at Keswick with Southey and Wordsworth in 1800; lectured in London to fashionable audiences, becoming in 1816 the guest of Mr. Gillman, a London physician, at Highgate, where he spent the remainder of his life; published "Christabel" in 1816, "Aids to Reflection" in 1825, his "Literary Remains" appearing in 1836-39.

I

DOES FORTUNE FAVOR FOOLS?[15]

"Does Fortune favor fools? Or how do you explain the origin of the proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the languages of Europe?"

This proverb admits of various explanations, according to the moods of mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and the soothing persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless, and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"--or the more sportive adage, that "the fairies take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion itself, in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the scarcely less general love of the marvelous, may be accounted for from our tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circumstances that are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons under them. Secondly, it arises from the safety and success which an ignorance of danger and difficulty sometimes actually assists in procuring; inasmuch as it precludes the despondence which might have kept the more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the depression which would retard its progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror in cases where the vivid perception of the danger constitutes the greater part of the danger itself. Thus men are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, over which they had ridden the night before in perfect safety, or at tracing the footmarks along the edge of a precipice which the darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause, yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact that the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or bedim those mysterious instincts of skill, which, tho for the most part latent, we nevertheless possess in common with other animals.

Or the proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and foolhardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing itself of them: and in this sense Fortune may be said to favor fools by those who, however prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in valor and enterprise. Again, an eminently good and wise man, for whom the praises of the judicious have procured a high reputation even with the world at large, proposes to himself certain objects, and adapting the right means to the right end attains them; but his objects not being what the world calls Fortune, neither money nor artificial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual worth, but more prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to have been favored by Fortune and be slighted; altho the fools did the same in their line as the wise man in his; they adapted the appropriate means to the desired end, and so succeeded. In this sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least of both the words, Fortune and Fools.

How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits Honor or wealth with all his worth and pains! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains.

REPLY

For shame! dear friend, renounce this canting strain! What would'st thou have a good great man obtain? Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain? Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain? Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, love, and light, And calm thoughts regular as infants' breath: And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death?

But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to Fortune, distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according to my favorite proverb, "extremes meet") the fool not seldom obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real existence in human affairs, from the infinite number of powers that are in action at the same time, and from the coexistence of things contingent and accidental (such as to us at least are accidental) with the regular appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make these words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the manifold appearances connected with them, are governed by certain laws no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which determine the latter are known and calculable, while those of the former are hidden from us.

At all events, the number and variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation; and that the sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of accident. Well! at the time of the full moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark, aware of no particular danger; a sudden gust of wind rends the clouds for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or habit of our mind, we exclaim, how lucky, or how providential! The copresence of numberless phenomena, which from the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the coexistence of these with any regular or necessary phenomenon (as the clouds with the moon, for instance) occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoiled the farmer's hay; and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same event to take place when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence.

Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good luck will excite less attention and the instances be less remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, tho the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and forced from her as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions--yet still they would not have been talked of or described as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh what a lucky fellow! Well, Fortune does favor fools--that's certain! It is always so!"--and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the other, we do, as poets in their diction and quacks of all denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvelous, by the sweeping proverb, "Fortune favors fools."

II

THE DESTINY OF THE UNITED STATES[16]

The possible destiny of the United States of America--as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakespeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humoring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanor on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.

Capt. Basil Hall's[17] book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?

What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the overtaxed class. For example, take the householders in London who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods; or a letter of lodgings who does so in his rent; or a stockholder who receives it back again in his dividends; or a country gentleman who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property; one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, tho the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinas, another state of itself, with which there is little inter-communion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property of the Southern States.

There are two possible modes of unity in a state; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no exception.

The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community may exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but in order to exist, it must be comprest and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_.